


Absent Protocol

by Nemonus



Category: Destiny (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Time Travel, F/M, Gen, Time Travel, Toland can't sing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-04
Updated: 2017-08-23
Packaged: 2018-03-05 10:48:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 54
Words: 21,159
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3117332
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nemonus/pseuds/Nemonus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Emissary of the Nine is seeding the bar with tendrils with every exhale, Eris sighs and spies on the balcony, and you've got a gun on your hip and a black hole in the palm of your hand. There are rules here, but no one's written them. A Destiny miscellanea containing drabbles and prompt fills.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Challenge

It’s not usual to see Guardians having a drink with the Vanguard, or to see the hangar bar this full. Maybe because Xur left, people who had come here to buy now gravitated to partying the mystery of the Nine away. You’ve had a few with friends and compared gear and swagger. That’s what takes you to the Vanguard: just a few steps, and he’s there at a table alone. You say the first thing that comes to mind.

“Why don’t you ask the Cryptarch to give me some armor I can use, not this Hunter stuff?”

Cayde leans toward you, green eyes and silver horn, disbelieving. His lights aren’t blinking, so unless you’re entirely misreading, he hasn’t had any of the circuit crossing that counts as intoxication among Exos.

“Do your job, Guardian,” Cayde says, not unfriendly. Not an interesting level of unfriendly, yet.

Someone at another table says that answers are a Warlock’s job, and the whole group guffaws, the sound bouncing off the shadowed rafters. 

“Why don’t you come out yourself?” You say, emboldened by an audience which, you realize from the brittle murmurs, is not on your side.

“I’ve got to leave something for you to kill,” he says. The studs on his gloves click together as he folds his hands.

The friends at the table are reaching for you now, pulling in and out like smoke wafting off of corpses in deep tunnels.

“I want to,” Cayde whispers. “One day, you’ll learn about that.” He looks at you, at the joints of your arms and legs, like he’s seeing the future and which one will break. You’re a Titan and armored and immortal and young, and strangers pull you back.


	2. Pen and Paper

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Featuring my human Warlock, Kass. I'm not sure whether she (or the female Titan in the first story) will be a recurring character or not.

Plant fibers, two years old. Black ink, under two moths old, traceable to a seller in the Warlock tower. Kass received the message gently from the frame’s claw. The origin of the components were less interesting than its content, on which the Guardian was concentrating while the Ghost ran passive sensors.

Kadi 55-30 didn’t seem interested in either, continuing to fret over her compartments. “Strange packets Address unknown. Lucky you arrived.”

"We’ll take care of it," the Ghost said, to disrupt the frame’s too-sober proclamations.

"I hope you do. Busy here. Many combustibles."

The Ghost considered joking back, talking about how difficult patrol was and what would the Cosmodrome be if all of the Guardians sat in kiosks and distributed mail? Kass would take that. It would bounce off her bond and her armor. Kadi 55-30, with her bobbing head and well-worn synaptic trails, wouldn’t like it. Option discarded.

The Ghost looked at the frame with hidden mixed pity and respect, between one built creature and another that were nevertheless gulfs apart in perspective and function. Beside him, Kass turned and leveled a more visible gaze at distant Eris.

Instead, tact. “Your job is difficult,” the Ghost said.

"Yes. Shipment coming soon for Shaxx," Kadi replied, busying herself with things heavier and more organized than the letter, and the Ghost felt a slight buildup of guilt and danger sense fade away.


	3. Bet On It

"I’ll make you a bet," Cayde-6 said, crossing his arms, mandible lights flickering. "Dead Orbit loses traction in the next five years."

Ikora did not so much take bets as spectate on them, as if they were Crucible matches. She had taken her share of Vanguard Dares, though, alone.

At the end of the day, when the Vanguard gathered at the window after sharing with the Speaker their reports, political talk felt both sacred and jumpy.

Zavala hooked his thumbs behind the sash at his waist. “Why them?”

"People like hope," Cayde said.

"They like it, but they might not trust in it. They trust in armor and ammo."

"That’s very Titan of you," Ikora said. Zavala laughed quietly, crinkling the skin around his flat Awoken eyes.

"We encase and cut through," Zavala said, and clapped Cayde on the shoulder. "And Dead Orbit attracts civilians too."

"Perhaps knowledge is the key," Ikora said. There was something Cayde didn’t understand about her, more because she was a Warlock than because she was a non-Exo. Angry, she drew power like a whirlpool; amused, she wryly showed calm-water adaptability. "People want to know that the future is either inevitable or able to be planned. I’ll take that bet."

Cayde nodded. “Mark it, friend.”

"Got that?" Zavala said.

His Ghost hovered with the rest of them in a loose circle in front of the Vanguard, three tiny stars projecting crosshatched lines of light.

Zavala’s Ghost said, “Bet recorded. Currently running three concurrently.”

The Vanguard talked a while longer, politics and war and hopefully wishes for the baby Guardians who stumble in and look at the surface of their wares and their classes, not yet the Tower history or the struggles underneath. Then the Ghosts pocketed themselves in derezzed space and the Vanguard went home, Cayde to the quarters where he would stand, reading maps, until the non-Exos woke up.


	4. Hand In Glove

Guile-11 isn’t the Warlock’s mentor.   
  
If anything _she_ should be teaching _him_ , even though he has lived more years since his return from death. Those years have been in the Tower, not in the field, and he can tell from her armor that Kass has fought in deeper pits than he has ever seen. Zavala and Rey look at one another. Rey raises an eyebrow and Zavala twitches a shoulder, and then Kass and Guile are partners on a patrol, assigned to pulling pieces from the bodies of the Fallen infesting the Cosmodrome.  
  
Kass carries herself with quiet professionalism, with the occasional hint of the jaunty, steely arrogance of combat Guardians. As soon as they res in the steppes of Old Russia, she tips her golden-helmeted head toward the sun and stands there for a minute. Guile is already moving out of the line of fire; he can see several Dregs congregating around a brown outcropping of rock already. Snow dapples the short grass underfoot.   
  
The Warlock trots down the hill. The two of them coordinate well enough, calling out shots and directions. Once, he flinches as her power busts like lightning and tears into a Vandal, but throughout the whole firefight he soaks up just as much damage as she does, the Fallen’s curving, tracking blasts bouncing off his armor. He would like a directive, would like a rank to better orient himself in relation to the quiet Warlock, but neither of them have one.  
  
As it is, he pulls Ether packets from harnesses and out from under Fallen armpits easily. Shoot, pull, step, shoot --   
  
Stop, because most of them are dead in a circle, crooked black arms in the air like winter branches. His radar still glares red, but he prioritizes a Captain menacing Kass. It has its back to him at the top of a steppe, four arms waving as it brings one hand up holding a blood-stained sword.   
  
Kass kills it just as Guile is deciding whether to risk pulling the trigger. Her fusion burst takes the Captain’s left two arms off, and fills Guile’s peripheral vision with green-white light. The body falls forward, though, and folds over Kass’ shoulder, adding its weight to hers even as she steps backwards to get out of the way. She reels over the side of the steppe and starts to blink.   
  
The blue light engulfs her for a moment, during which he rounds the side of the Captain in two long strides. Just as he thinks she doesn’t need his help, or that she had blinked already for sure, she coheres again and keeps falling. Small rocks bounce down the side of the escarpment behind her.   
  
He isn’t really her mentor but he reaches for her anyway, grabs her arm at the elbow and presses their forearms together. Hauls her up the ledge while she’s shooting one-handed under his arm, rash but certainly not rude - they’ve both died before, and he has a feeling she’s about to remind him when she looks him in the eye. There’s no standoffish pride there when they reach solid ground, though. (He isn’t her mentor.) Three Dregs hit the ground behind him.  
  
She scans the tumbled ground around the hill before looking back at him. “Thanks.”  
  
“You looked like you needed some backup.”  
  
“I’m not good with sudden drops.”  
  
“We’ve all got that in common.”  
  
She chuckles but trails off, too, worried about something he does not understand, but sensed from the beginning. There is a hesitation in her, a weakness an enemy smart enough could use.   
  
They finish the joint mission, bring their bounty back to a nonplussed Vanguard. Kass is a combat Guardian, and Guile, still known to most as the Shipwright, has his own work to do. He respects the quiet Warlock on his journey, but thinks the same of many others too, and finds others more admirably vicious. He doesn’t see her again for years. 


	5. Armoring

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The next few chapters may be part of an interconnected story that I'll be calling Conflux. I don't plan to write it as a novel-length fic, but bits and pieces of it will probably appear and connect to each other. It will follow my Exo Titan, Guile-11, and Eris in stories that may or may not meet, and may or may not parallel each other.

    The air from the Last City pulls heavily on the hem of Eris’ robes as she stands beside the railing on the Tower. The sun is almost hot enough to melt some of the patchy snow creeping up the distant foothills, and in the tepid, clear air she can smell what might be cooking fires, or kiln or tannery fires. Her ship hums a lullaby or a battle hymn to itself beside her.   

    What was the Last City now? What had it ever been? Who walked the alleys between the tops of those buildings, featureless with distance?

    They would die quickly, says the Hive, says the black waters at Crota’s feet, says Omnigul and her brood in Eris’ head. Some would fight. We should be afraid of some. 

    She reaches under the gauze across her face and touches the skin around her right eye, careful not to dislodge her cap or to nudge the lower lid of the topmost eye. The skin is cold and gives slightly as she rubs it. Once, it was as scaly and flaking as the skin of the Hive, but what disease was there has retreated, leaving the eyes sunken lightly into her skull. The eyes cannot blink, despite their vestigial lids. The third one most often twitches on its own. It isn’t connected right, she has been told. There was no branching optic nerve for it to build on, and so it had to grow one. Ichor wept from the eyes in stringy, endless puddles.   

    Above the eyes are the plated scales, and what remains of her hair. She draws her hand away. 

    Her memories make it difficult to look directly at at the city, even moreso than her eyes. Or perhaps the one had blurred into the other down in the tunnels, so that she was not sure what was handicap and what was attack, what came from the outside and what forced itself in. The world sways and she sways with it, riding the waveforms, easing along the Light. The Light had taken her just as the Darkness had, in the tunnels. “Take, take, take.” She says to the wind, fingers reaching for the gun she keeps with all the rest of her trinkets-treasures-teachers on her ship. “Take - and be sure to count what you have before you give back.”

    She needs to see the city. 

    There is something there, in her records. She cannot remember it, or where she has written it down. The rooms in her ship are too dark, too labyrinthine. She has written it down, though. There was an incentive, as strong as a command from the Vanguard. Although it did not come from them, they do know about it. Their faces blur in her mind, and become horrors. They know. 

    Eris will register to take the elevators down to the city. The long drop will not be what she expects. (She expects falling and snapping teeth.) There will be civilization at the bottom of the Tower, encircled by mountains like the walls of a crater into which the Traveler fell, the Tower blasting up in the middle at the point of impact. 

    She will find farmers and hunters out there, people with tiger skins on their backs, hunters holding live eagles on wrists wrapped in leather and cloth. She will tell them - 

    No. She must not be seen, not yet. She or the Vanguard demand it. 

    So she molds the light. She lifts the sphere that the Light forms in her hands, and sees in the green patterns that it is a portal. She pulls from it another form. The form is buried beneath images stored perhaps unconsciously, perhaps by the Light itself: the helmeted faces of Guardians, Venus foliage so green it almost glows, stagnant pools of water with algae shading down from that poison green to the blue of Earth from orbit. She waits until those pictures have left her, and then paints the Light on her face. She paints an imaginary face not her own, just a sketch of a vague humanity. The skin tone  matches her own. The eyes are small and watery, not so much as to look loose against her skin. She might be noticed in a crowd because of her trappings, but not for beauty nor ugliness.

    The presence of the Light presses against her, suffocating and miserable like the Hive-touch. In a moment, she can take another breath, and turns to face the Tower.

    The air is getting cooler by the time she walks out of the City. 


	6. Follow Him Down

The mission to find the Reef Queen’s prize on Venus was one of the first hunts Guile-11 had gone on in years. He had three ships in drydock waiting for him in the Tower, one with a Vanguard seal and a busted NLS drive. That drive deserved as many killmarks as a gun, in its own way - it was as lethal as any Guardian, although the ships lurked in orbit while the killing went on. Guile-11 pocketed weapons with the rest of them, and it was partially because he believed this that he agreed to accompany his twin to the lair of the Gate Lord.

14:25, a humid afternoon, Venus dripping and screaming around them. Zydron was deployed in pieces in front of the portal, drawing together, speaking in machine tongues. (The Vex were like the Exos, in that way.) Guile-11 had already fought and killed and died once today, following in Guile-12‘s footsteps. The Gate Lord walked skeleton-thin and skyscraper-huge across the summit of the mountainous steps. Guile-11 looked up at it, his jaw lights flashing.

He didn’t feel clumsy when he fought. The weapon fell into his hands as if he had magnetized it, although he could tell that Guile-12 moved differently, would come out statistically better at the end. They destroyed Vex in gouts of white light and black shrapnel.

More than once, they put their backs against a block of stone dotted with lichen and waited out a storm. Once, Guile-12 looked at his brother and signaled alarm, over and over. Guile-11 opened his mouth but could not, as usual, find the right words for the sensory overload that was threatening both of them. Vex fire bounced off the stone, and Guile-11 transmitted a burst of static, numbers layered too thickly to form understandable language. Just a loud packet, a scream, and both of them could turn and face the hill again, lights still flashing as Vex pieces clattered off their hulls.

Dark Zydron, though. The Gate Lords commanded the forces that swept the Vex portals from one side to the next, and both Exos could feel it as distant, prickly static. For Guile-11 it was a synesthetic yellow, clashing with the blue-white of the lines traced by the portals into the stone. Zydron pulled the strings at the center of it all and was nigh indestructible besides.

The Guardians dashed for the Gate Lord after another endless wave. Vex bodies hung in halves off the sides of the cliff, or piled in scrapyard drifts. Zydron kicked through some of them as it lurched forward.

14:34. They got far enough to nearly saw one of the Gate Lord’s legs off. Guile-11’s belt-fed automatic ripped sparking chunks out of alien metal. Then a foot came down and separated the two Exos for a second, with metal screaming again. Guile-11 backpedaled, rethreading ammunition as he went, waiting for Guile-12 to reappear on the other side.

Instead, the Gate Lord scraped its foot back into the portal. Guile-11 saw an Exo arm emerge, then the nose of a gun as the Guardian started to wiggle forward with his firearm trapped beneath him. His mouth creaked open in one of those screams.

14:36. Guile-11 opened up on the injured leg. Zydron nearly bent in half, guns like mouths biting at the ground, but didn’t lift its foot. Guile-11 rolled onto his back with a snapping sound; if his leg was under the Vex foot, he had just broken it in order to fire.

14:37. The world tugged at all three of them, and then there were more Vex pouring out of the air. Guile-11 destroyed a foot soldier in one shot to the base of the spine, then needed to reload.  Needed to back up toward the broken ground behind him, get back into cover and wreak tried-and-true havoc from back there.

Zydron turned its red eye and summoned the gate to retreat.

14.38. As it broke apart, becoming one with the silicon-laced stone behind it, Guile-12’s body did too. The segments floated for a moment, haloed in blue-white.

Guile-11 fired at two Vex, then backed up. They followed him around the stones, followed down the sides of the Endless Steps, followed when he splashed into the swamp.

14:38. Let someone else kill the monster, Guile-11 thought.

14:38. They come after him even after logic dictated that they should know he was retreating. Guile-12 had done the brunt of the work. Mathematically, Guile-11 the Shipwright could not win a fight against the Gate Lord’s guard. He knew it, but they did not. Transmitting it to them seemed like a distant but plausible option, a language he knew just well enough to speak in fractured sentences. He held together, at least. His Ghost hadn’t had to rebuilt him from shattered scratch. (The Ghost hadn’t said much, since Guile-12 was taken.)  

14:37. The world stretched, because the Vex were in the world. The portal sank tendrils into the ground. The wall at the top of the steps was just one manifestation of them.

14:36. Guile-11 thought he saw his earnest companion’s face screaming, jaw open too wide.

14:35. The conflux was all around him and he was all around it. There were voices in the datastreams. There were wounded eyes that sought out unwounded things born upon the flagstones.

14:37. The world stretched, because the Vex were in the world.

14:38. Guile-11 fell backward into the swamp, water splashing around his collar. Someone else had jetted into view on a EV-30 Tumbler, and they did not know what they had interrupted. A skeptical helmet tipped toward Guile-11, but he was just another rookie.

17:55 The loss was not a cause for pity at the Tower. It would have been if he had been better friends with the combat Guardians, but his relationships with them were passing. The support staff and his assistants say their words, tell him that they are sorry that someone else has been eaten by the war. The mystery of Guile-12’s death was not unusual. The world was plagued with mysteries; they were coded into it.

The fact that he abandoned his brother was not a routine that Guile-11 ran over and over. He stored it chronologically in his first primary and second emergency memory cores. He was not one for guilt.

He ran cleaning routines on his internal clocks until his insides felt scrubbed and shining.

21:12. He went back to work.


	7. Departure

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Part of Conflux.

    The Hive have invaded the Last City, even though no one can see them. Eris shuffles, her spiked shoulders brushing the dusty cloaks and tin pot armor that passes her by. There is Darkness in the green light reflecting off of tiled roofs, there is mockery both obscene and plain in a sign, swinging above the door of a hookah bar, that reads ‘The Watching Gun.’

    Eris aims for the district bazaar, following the press of people wherever it squirms thickest. It’s high noon and cold, snow flaking on the mountains in the distance although the bedraggled plants in pots are free of frost. The Last City is between seasons, between times, and not nearly as much as it should be: something should be lurching askew from it, a hinge torn off, screws falling, turning, stripping all at the same time.

    “The machines,” Eris mutters, dry lips pulling apart in strands and cracks before, instinctively, she licks them. She has spoken low enough that no one can hear, although they could perhaps see her mouth move under the guise of human eyes that she has cast over herself. Too many voices pitch and haggle for someone to hear her alone, although perhaps the Hidden will carry her movements all the way up the empty air, to Ikora’s ear. Eris is not inclined today to stop them.

    The first stand she sees in the bazaar proper is a solid wooden table piled with brown-paged books. Some are bloated with moisture, others thin like a person wearing clothes too big for their frame. At the table beyond it a white tiger lays in the shade of overflowing bolts of cloth. When Eris looks up to track the wave of a narrow, orange banner she catches a scent of spices and herbs, something sharp and garlicky. The shadows are so mild here. Tower nights are not deep for Eris.

    She passes a table where plastic bottles and cans have been made into imperfectly fitting matryoshka dolls, and another holding small, rusting pins. An agent of the Hidden loiters across the roadway, one foot on a curb. Beyond the sedate, huge tiger she passes a group of children playing a card game on a wide, low chipped flight of stone steps, and then she spots the first thing that reminds her of the war. 

    The pins have signs to ward off evil painted in contrasting colors. One shows three dots on a grainy black-brown backing. Eris looks at the vendor, a small-framed Exo. “Why these eyes?” she says. Choosing words is like pulling fish out of a swamp; they come out mad and dripping, or are lost somewhere in the muck. Green light, in the caves, was a warning that she learned to use.

    “Some say they protect them from the evil eye,” the Exo says, sizing Eris up, perhaps choosing which story to tell. “Some say they drive off bandits from the Moon, too. Or some people just like to be reminded that they could do their part in a battle if they tried.”

    Someone pushes past Eris, and she turns to look at a broad back. She has no possessions to steal. It is not the agent of the Hidden that has jostled her. A human child sits on the cobblestones behind the Exo, and a bird of prey calls three croaking notes in the distance.

    Eris nods. To the vendor, her eyes will appear kind. “To which philosophy do you ascribe?”

    “Huh.” The vendor croaks mechanically, perhaps a sigh or perhaps a process required for her to speak. “One for now,” she says with a thin, rusty smile, “and one for just in case. But if you want philosophies, you want the street marked with the yellow tree.”

    “Oh?”

    “It’s just down that way.”

    Eris follows the Exo’s pointing finger.

    The yellow tree is in fact a Chinese character painted on a pre-Collapse wall. Someone has bricked over most of it with newer material, but this part of the bazaar isn’t difficult to discern. The tables and rugs are piled with books and scrolls. Some of the tables are empty and their owners sit on top of them, using their words as their wares.

    She thinks someone is talking to her as soon as she steps into the alley, but the cross-legged human’s cries bounce right past her. They are meant for the philosopher-librarian opposite, who flips through the yellowing pages of a book that looks hide-bound. Eris would have found this place by sound alone if she was not directed to it.

    “Guardian,” someone says, and she looks up. Does that title still belong to her? What does Eris guard, other than the microcosm of Light in her hands? False names, false titles. Eyes and Hands. 

    The words are not intended for her, even though she is inclined to pick them out of a crowd. Two Awoken philosophers are debating the Crucible from opposite sides of the street.

    “And if the Guardians fight among themselves, is their Light diminished?” One Awoken paws his hair out of his eyes.

    “Energy is transferred, not diluted!” the other says. “Sunlight, electric arc, all become part of each Guardian’s body.”

    “But still, these are attacks. Is electric current adding to the body it kills?”

    “Guardians cannot die! Their energy stays with them.”

    “Do they need to practice dying as much as living?”

    “Some say.” The female Awoken seems to have latched on to a strategy in which she is confident of winning. “Look at us now! The energy of conflict enriches both of our schools. So it is with the Guardians, when they are not in outright war.” 

    Eris walks through this loud marketplace, looking at the books for anything that might have come from far enough away to be of interest to herself or to the Warlocks. There are no thrall-skin books, nothing that whispers to her. At the only large door on the street, one made of red wood with a large stone overhang, a woman is peddling what looks like signs scavenged from other vendors, and shouting detailed philosophies based around the stolen words:

    “Bean pies, fresh and hot, green and stringy, the true taste is not the true taste. Batteries, leaking like veins, energy running down and running up.”

    There is an undercurrent of fear, of the war; occasionally someone mentions endings or the cracking of the Moon. Some glimmer is exchanged in the poetry street, but not a lot. What a port in the lee of the Tower, Eris thinks. The war has come here but people keep it out by disregarding it, arming themselves at the same time. They have their marks to ward against the Hive or the Fallen, and they are not ready. There could be Hive in every corner. When time unravels, there already are. 

    Eris knows that the agent of the Hidden sees her leave the alley, but does not follow her out the gate to see which way she walks into the wilderness. The air sits cold and calm, the Tower a spike driven only far enough into the Earth to allow it to stand.   
  



	8. Mistakes

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In which Kass burns someone's eyebrows off.

There was a group aiming to go after Crota, but they needed a Sunsinger.

Five well-armed and armored Guardians patrolling the hangouts, asking, loudly, wherever they went. Kass looked up from her drink and spoke into the steady noise. “What happened to your sixth?”

“Injured,” said an Awoken Titan, turning to look at her. “She’ll be back. You look like a Warlock who could could help us out.”

“You need a Fireborn, don’t you?” Kass said.

The Titan nodded. 

“I can barely make Radiance.”

“Aw, come on…”

It took will to switch, to lurch her mind from the cool stillness of the void to the gravitic shifts of the sun. She kindled a tiny, light yellow flame in one hand, but the effort to keep it from spreading was too confusing, too much like wrestling with something that constantly changed size and weight; the fire flared and went out, and when it did the Awoken was blinking, her Ghost buzzing around her in harried circles, with her elegant white eyebrows reduced to patches.

“I don’t think they’ve grown back,” Kass would say later, when the seekers had moved on and she had found people with whom she was more familiar. Even Yarrow had winced at the story. “With the Traveler’s blessing,” Kass said, smiling, “perhaps one day they will.”


	9. Exclusion Zone

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Part of Conflux.

You can’t punch a Cabal to death, Guile-11 thought as he lay on his back behind a crate. So far, anyway, that plan had been proven to be ineffective.

“You can’t punch a Cabal to death,” he rasped to the Ghost floating above his left eye. “Take note.”

“I cannot take notes,” the Ghost deadpanned, “and I had been telling you that shortly before you died.”

There were still Cabal at the other end of the tunnel in which he lay. Guile could hear them stomping. “Were you?”

“Your memory banks have been a bit fallible lately,” the Ghost said.

Guile rubbed his head, his fingers clicking against defunct antennae-horns. “I’ve lost 15 percent. Of everything.” He sat up far enough to look the Ghost in the spot of light that served as its eye. A Cabal rocket had taken half of his face, but everything had been rebuilt now. He would have to replace the yellow Fallen tooth he had installed in the back of his jaw flange, next to the LED.

“I refashioned the tooth,” the Ghost said. “The material was all there.”

Surprised, Guile opened and closed his mouth hard and felt the slight click of the tooth as the metal vibrated. “Thank you.”

“That’s a lot, 15 percent is. You should probably have that looked at.”

It was mostly from the Endless Steps. The Ghost had access to the records that showed that. It knew. Did Cabal have brothers? Did their families fight together? The Tower hadn’t required him to do research.

He stood up. His newly-acquired armor was comfortable, but it was unsettling to catch the unfamiliar color in his peripheral vision. If Guile-12 had been here, he could have flanked the Cabal. Both of them could have taken a wall.

“What’s your plan?” the Ghost said.

His gun was already in his left hand, where the Ghost had placed it. The Cabal were massing in the red desert outside. “Nothing, brother. I mean, nothing, Ghost.” He shook his head. “Just try not to get myself cut in half.”


	10. Hunter

_Why are you here? Why your knife and your bones?_  
  
Because the Hive sap life and replace it with not death, but unlife.  
  
_The Tower isn't your home. It was as unlife to you when you slept in the Reef and when you slept in the wreckage._  
  
You were not incorrect but you were sleepy, slogging through the slow visions of your own mind. Almost dreaming.  
  
Slide, cut, slash a stomatad knife across the face of a Knight that bleeds black blood in a thin, uneven line.  
  
_Do you fight because the Speaker tells you?_  
  
Don't declare that a loss.  
  
Lean back as a purple blast scorches past your helmet, unsling the sniper rifle that bucks in your hands.  
  
_Why are you here?_  
  
Because you were pointed this way.  
  
The Ghost is a no-weight in no-space but you can still almost feel the electrical spark of its awareness as it hides. At home you tried to put it on a shelf, tried to treat it like an unruly frame with a bad control board, but there was no mechanic who could fix that, except for the Traveler. You suppose you would say 'to repair my Ghost' if someone asked you why you went to the Tower, shy and angry, and it would be true. There was nothing wrong with your Ghost.  
  
Skid to a stop in front of Oryx's shrine.  
  
_Are you dreaming now?_  
  
It isn't a Hive-voice that hounds you to the bronze mechanisms of the Oryx shrine. Only yourself, and the memory of the sisters of the Reef, and throwing these off like sparks helps you focus on the tread and the turn. The Oryx shrine is in front of you and that name doesn't mean much to you. The Black Garden's heart is poisoned, a stranger hounds you; these things must be reluctantly examined first.  
  
But later, there seems some clarity missing from the edge of your own doubts, like the Hive-presence in that place whetted the edges of the insistent narrative. Maybe the sound wasn't yours after all.


	11. Path of the Warlock

Kass is jogging across the courtyard when she sees him: a thin Awoken, lurking near the stairs like he’s afraid to go down to the Vanguard. Heavy, gray shirt, muddy stains even on his Ghost as it flicks its facets. Just got back from the Cosmodrome, she thinks, plucked from where ever he was raised. 

Later, Ikora Rey tells her that a newly reborn Guardian was asking after her. She looks down at her own hands, flexing her fingers so that her gloves creak. How could she be someone who was admired? The Traveler looked at them all equally. How could she be seen as a veteran? She still teetered at the edge of long flights of stairs. 

Perhaps, she thinks, she’d see if he was still in the hall when she returned.


	12. Emissary

“Do you know him?” Kass asks, brushing shoulders with Eris on one side and Guile on the other. Neither contact is gentle; even in home wear the Exo Titan is hard-edged and bleeds electric heat, and Eris’ armor is leathery. Kass watches both of their hands as they sit close in the bar. Her own curl around a mug, but Guile is Exo-still, and Eris lays her gloved palms flat against the table as if preparing to run.

A crowd of Guardians have gathered around Xur on the other side of the bar. Some move aside for their brethren who transact, but others just eye the Agent of the Nine, or toss questions: _What are you selling? Why Strange Coins? What’ll you have to drink?_

Xur drones about holding his body together by the nuclei.

As Kass asks, Eris eases away, her hands curling on the lacquered surface. Eris could have asked what Kass knew, or about why Kass asked, or about why it mattered. Kass didn’t expect a straight answer. She sees a shiver in Eris’ hands instead, a momentary slackness in Eris’ expression as a black streak drips from her chin into her collar. No answer from her or from the Agent of the Nine, his hood just visible behind his customers. Guile looks at the women sharp, with a creak of his neck, and Kass holds as still as the void, waiting in the calm between the forces, wondering what Eris sees.


	13. Home

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Requested by tumblr user naschamsant, who said "Eris being given a place to stay at the tower by Ikora after her ship is blown up, and not knowing how to have a permanent space for herself after spending so long with nothing."

The sun sets over the Last City, and Eris looks back to see her own shadow falling from the balcony into the small rooms she was given. Oddly shaped and mean, it fits into the walls between dormitories. It’s a luxury, she knows, warm and quieter than the shared rooms. There are even treasures here, things she was given to by well-wishers or recovered from her ship (taken cruelly, but taken for the good of the Guardian, and that’s what stops her from hissing this time). She has more than enough trappings to scatter about her new post in the Vanguard hall.

Her door is barred, and she glares at the place where the lock slots in. The gift of the room was an apology from Ikora but not from Cayde, and so inhabiting it is a sort of silent, useless protest against the Vanguard’s cooperation. She will take what she needs from the Tower, but perhaps only allow herself to give so much back.

But those are selfish thoughts, engendered by that brash, if effective, Hunter and the rush of Oryx’s arrival in the system. Maybe she will become used to the room, and thankful for it. Maybe Toland felt the same conflicted anger about his exile.


	14. The Ram

* * *

 

The helm is heavy, but it isn’t bone. Kass is sure of that.

The black mask feels like fieldweave, the horns light enough that they might really be gold. Kass takes the Ram, and Xur burbles quietly at the Tower. 

* * *

In the field, the echoes come, and the usual meditations don’t dissuade them.

... PRAISE ...

She slips into the Void and slams a Fallen through the sternum, her breath coming deeper. The Void always passes the edges of her lungs, but there’s a certain corruption to the wide open sky. The Fallen die. Kass knows a curse when she feels one.

* * *

A week. A week with that thing under her arm and on her head, and doesn’t it shine? Doesn’t it point like a compass? She has conferred with other Warlocks, has heard the rumors, has had adventures untold and even _died_ with that thing on her head, whispering PRAISE into the cold Void until Kass means it too. PRAISE ME. 

Xur looks small and hunched in front of her.

“Why does it whisper?” she asks, pushing the Ram forward. Xur won’t lift his slackly swinging arms, doesn’t take it. Instead, he bends in his sinuous bend and says “The atoms are not ours to control.”

The Ram says, ... YOU ARE THE OLD ONE. YES THEY ARE ...

* * *

When she stores the Ram, it isn’t because she wants to stop the PRAISE. It’s because she has found something better, something with which she can slay Oryx. If she went to Xur now, the other Guardians in search of his wares would part for her. 

She stores it, and sees stranger things, and then she rests, and sometimes wonders.


	15. Prescience

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Part of a time travel AU where post-TTK Eris returns to the Tower before the attack on Mare Imbrium. Eris/Toland

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

Their reunion was businesslike and quiet. She explained, and he took it all in with the lidded, downcast gaze of someone checking her math. When he looked at her, he looked at her hands.

She sat at her desk in her small room and drew diagrams of her plan on a browning sheet of paper. He stood next to her, his arms folded.

Explaining it had been easy, especially since now she had more words than he did to describe the Hive. He could imagine the pit, caught his breath and sighed it back out in a sharp burst as if he’d been punched when she told him about the Deathsinger’s cries. Surely her nightmares, her patchy memories, her sing-song rationalizations were familiar to him. She had recognized them in him retroactively, of course, although that had been before she had spent very long in the pit.

Eris Morn had survived, and this Toland - three years younger than he would have been or was - saw all the proof too desperately to deny that.

In her room, he idly reached out to stroke the air near her curled left hand.

“Did the Hive take well to our killing them?” Toland said.

Eris drew another curve. “A king rose behind the fallen prince.”

His bare fingers brushed the side of hers, a movement as light as wind from the knuckle to the cracked skin around her nail. She turned her hand over to show the palm.

“And what hooks can we put in that one?” Toland asked.

“It will not be us who slays that king, although some of his treasures … “

“So you are here to ... expedite the process.”

His voice had distracted her, so she kept drawing - remembering what she could of the layout of Crota’s fortress in the pit, of the other tomb dimension overlaid on top of it. It would have been better if she had another piece of paper, translucent as skin.

Toland ran his finger along the bottom of her thumb, tracing the half-moon shape of the muscle. Sympathetic twinges set off flashes of sensation in her arm, her neck. She looked away, more to amplify the touch than to show annoyance. The pencil marks on the paper shed charcoal like bone shed dust.

Eris worked, and Toland quietly, intently explored her palm and the pads of her fingers.

Until she twitched, finally, and the idea of the work disappeared in a haze strung tight, and he bent down to press his lips against the cords of her wrist.

“We had been something,” she said to the top of his head.

It had been so long ago - felt like a distant thing, emotionless and unnecessary. That unresolved look. That day before he died, when he had looked at her in the dark.

She lifted his chin with a hand fuzzy with charcoal dust and kissed him.

Later, she wondered how this person became the one she chose. He slept with one arm over her, his face buried against her shoulder. When he fell asleep she was combing her hands through his hair, and it hung over his back and fanned out across her. She would have to cut his hair eventually, after he agreed on taking the same kind of Hive eyes he helped her to acquire in the first place.

She hadn’t shown him her own eyes behind the gauze, and probably wouldn’t until he had his own. She didn’t think he would be difficult to convince.


	16. Whispers in the Walls

The worms hear things, and they tell them to the walls.

At the breach, the walls try to regrow old bone but have not been correctly prepared: the worms go to the edges and gnaw. The runnels that once channelled Oryx’s power are dry, but there is enough hate left, enough green fire burning and acrid water splashing. Processes go on behind invisible curtains, and the worms hear their creaks and echoes.

The Guardians - they bring their own hatreds and petty rivalries and their near-religious belief in the guns at their sides, and that war-faith is not so different from the Sword Logic, no, not at all, until - 

The reforged Swords themselves come, and there is a great rippling in the colonies.

Guardians scoop up the worms to waft their scent onto them, and then drop them down again into the dry dirt.

The Dreadnaught sits stable in its orbit and grows, slowly, slowly with the gnawing and the anger. 

The worms whisper of succession.

Some day, the yellowing walls say, there will be a king again.


	17. King's Wreckage

Well, queen of wreckage and oceans, this isn’t such a pacific world as your legions fled from, is it? The currents swirl from Earth out to the cloud, sweeping past you all the flotsam and jetsam, carrying the messages of this war that you finally, finally involved yourself in.  

That bombardment? Useful. I am reassured by its directness. It does seem to have sent the citizenry into a spiral, as the other bombardment did - but the prince is much quieter than the emissary about his grief. The bombs have not dissipated _entirely_ uselessly against the carapace of the black ship.

From another angle, the mechanism can be seen clearly. There was physical process in the droning of the techeuns. It weakened the Reef, ever so slightly. It made the current stronger, more easily felt against the docks and the flags. But the end?

Everybody has to confront the symbolic possibility of their own death some time. I see you picked today.


	18. Infinite Ascent

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Euclid belongs to @saltineofswing

Kass saw one Sparrow drop out half a second after the race started, but she was already angling toward the first gate, and slammed her heel down. 

She made the turn, hit the gate. The racers clumped together, almost knocked knees until the first big drop where two cut close to the wall, the engines screaming in her left ear.  The rest was a loud, continuous wash of engines, jostling. A struggle not unlike the one the Guardians undertook for the Traveler, Kass thought as she crossed the finish line still in the pack. Rougher, though, less noble - and a little boring.

The one who dropped out was Euclid. She recognized the solitary Warlock from the Tower, where their mutual friends shifted in and out of Eris’ orbit and each other’s; he was staggeringly strong when he pointed in the right direction. Now he shuffled along near the track, watching people dismount and bicker. 

“I think my Sparrow should have been the other way around,” Euclid said as Kass approached him, and he rubbed his hand on the back plate of his skull. “But I found her.”

It took Kass a moment to realize that he meant the same person she did, and that he had jumped from one topic to another. 

“Sh-sh-she stays off the track,” Euclid said. “I mean, of course. I see you didn’t.”

Kass’ Sparrow dissolved behind her. “I’m helping her. But time allowed me to race also, and it was … instructive.” 

“I see what you mean You looked like you knew what you were doing, though. I mean, you did well.” 

She bowed her head for a moment in thanks. “I am not sure I’ll race again.”

“No, I mean, you did really well.” 

“Thank you.” 

She didn’t want to ask him why he hadn’t raced, but let the idea of it trickle into her mood anyway, little prickles of lightning questions touching his awareness. He could answer them if he wanted. If not, no harm in the Light -

No harm, but he let the signals slide over his own presence, a deep, calm pool of Void that reflected her lightnings back with gentle sparks. Then he turned and she followed him up a familiar hill, behind the banners, to where Eris stood behind an outcropping, bending over to hold a small algae-orange rock between her fingers. She had known they were there, Kass thought. It was difficult to tell what Eris was thinking, her pretense alternately a swirl of impressions or completely hidden. She didn’t startle, though, just leveled a too-calm stare at Euclid. 

He laced his fingers together, but spoke more as if continuing a conversation than starting one.  “Not to … I mean not to presume, but what are you doing here?”

“The Taken incursion ignores the boundaries we set for ourselves,” Eris said. 

“Even those emblazoned with colors and set on sharp curves. Here I can study them, with fewer bullets in the air.” 

“Is that … safe?”

“There is no safety here. We are tracking their movements. Finding the best places.” 

Kass saw Euclid’s lights flare, a complex pattern running from eyes to jaw and back too fast for her to read. From the gestural tone of it, he was flustered, but that had already been clear.  “Th-that’s very thorough. I know the Taken are still working on an incursion against the Vex, so here … ”

Eris tipped her head in that expression which might portent words but equally might not. This time she did speak, absently: “We have been given a little time. There are always … ” And her voice cracked while, behind Kass’ back, another race started up. “More wars.”

“I could help you too,” Euclid said, rushing the words. 

Another stare while the black gore rolled down Eris’ cheeks, and then her lips curled. “I will find some traces for you to examine,” she said, and Kass felt Euclid’s presence tuck into a slightly less erratic swirl of Void energy. 

“Thank you,” Euclid said. “Thank you!” 

A choked-sounding horn blared from the bottom of the hill, and Kass looked for a moment before turning back and crossing her arms. “I think that’ll be the last race for me for now as well.”

Eris gestured her toward the tumbled landscape beyond, and the race flashed by again.


	19. Deathsong

Eriana decides that Toland is crazy many times over and for many different reasons. This is one of them: She opens a door and hears the droning notes echoing off the walls and bookshelves, and then the snuffling laugh.

Eris decides that Toland is impossible several times for several different reasons. This is one of them: He presses his lips against her shoulder and kisses it, and hums a song between breaths that makes her feel cold and prickly, like electric shock.

Eriana decides that Toland is irreplaceable several times, but this is one of them: At the deep mouth of the pit he speaks unfamiliar words, and reality shivers tympanic against the Void and the Darkness and her antennae, and fewer Thralls come to them.

Eris decides that Toland is sane in one moment: when she sings the words he knew, the grammar of which she now understands perhaps better than he did, and the memories of her team rise up in a great puzzle-piece design, and she brings her Guardian out of the pit.


	20. Field Hide

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Prompt from illumynare: Eris/Toland + blanket fort.

The edges of the crater reached out toward the Earth like teeth.

Down in the shallow bowl, Eris finished stringing thermal blankets between the low, upheaved peaks at the crater’s center.

“I told you,” she said to Toland’s back. “It’s a _field hide_.”

Toland appeared to have become bored with the banter, and wondered slightly up the ridge. They had come crashing down that slope not long ago, chasing Hive and suggestions of Hive, Toland for their songs and Eris for their tracks. Knights or Thrall could still be stalking the edges of the campsite, waiting for impertinent, curious Guardians to fight knife-to-sword on the Light’s newly lost territory. Eris’ Ghost hovered nervously by her cheek, close enough that its gentle blue glow cast the gray and azure shadows of the moon in sharper light.

The only Guardians on this world, and here out of desperation: a last push before the Hellmouth. Eriana had wanted at least someone on her fireteam to find out how the Hive had spread over the unclaimed, unneeded parts of the Moon, and she had wanted a Hunter and a Warlock to do it in their own ways. Eriana had, Eris suspected, also wanted to prove something that might effect the morale of her team.

Eris, in part, wanted to prove it too.

Toland took a seat on a rock and looked up at the Earth, the hooked horns of his helmet very dark against the sun on the regolith. “So this is how Hunters hide themselves,” he said, still criticizing her attempt at building them a shelter as the night came on. “and then mock Warlocks for giving their fears elaborate names.”

“And how do Warlocks do it?” she snapped, knowing the reply was weak. She walked out away from the hide, taking long strides, feeling suddenly rangy now that he mentioned her order.

“Warlocks have a habit of staying in safe places overnight.”

She stopped behind him. Once, on their way here, she had plunged the point of her knife between a Thrall’s ribs and heaved the corpse under her arm, to get it out of the way of her feet. Toland had been there, had snapped the neck from the shoulders with a burst of energy Eris had felt in her core. When he had turned to face another Hive his back pressed against hers, curved and cloaked.

“So you don’t plan to sleep?” she said.

“The gravest Hive-terrors may arrive at night.”

“Then we should take turns watching. You’ll exhaust yourself the other way.”

Maybe it was the impatience in her voice that did it, or the selfishness: Toland knew perfectly well that they were more likely to survive if they were both well-rested.

“Simplicity,” he said, and stood up and turned around. “The terminal lines, the tides. Do you hear the Moon speaking to us of death, Eris?”

“It all speaks of death these days, Warlock. Sit at the mouth of the hide. Then at least you’ll know death won’t come at your back.”

He nodded, incrementally, and followed her.

He didn’t mock her construction once; just sat down at the entrance, under the blanket she had unpacked from its tiny sealed container. She would doze, she told herself; she would half-sleep, and then she would watch from the entrance for the things with the blades in the dark. The blankets were taken up making the small roof, so she pillowed her hands under her head and let her armor be what comfort it could be. Bait did not need to get comfortable. Maybe census-takers did …

“Toland?”

“Eris.”

“The Tower kicked you out. Why do you care what anyone thinks about the Warlocks?”

“I don’t.”

“You reacted when I jabbed at you.”

The horned mask turned; she could still see him over the top of her knees. “The most important order is the one which respects the fight.”

That was either surprisingly magnanimous or frightening, but she was becoming used to not knowing the difference with him.

She slept afterward, in an unhelpful shallow sleep, with her Ghost buzzing quietly on the ground next to her. The length of the day was bound to disorient her, so she gave up on telling how long their watches would last. She trusted her ability to wake when she planned to, and planned for a few hours. His silhouette was a wavy black tower, and when she dreamed it was of the Tower too.

She drowsed, so that she was never quite unaware of the dusty, hard moon-surface, but the dream was strong. In it she walked the halls of the Tower, which opened unexpectedly onto wide vistas or glass-roofed solaria. The light was golden and purple and beautiful; there was something rotting behind it, all cracked open and teeming with spores. A presence prickled at her shoulders. There was an evil that no one else noticed, or that had cast a glamour to make itself seem covered in Light, and only Eris knew —

Except, she found more comfort than horror in the idea. It had done such a poor job of hiding itself that, there in plain sight, the disease-spores and the corruption just sat like a stagnant pool, harmless, adding its sickly green to the spectrum that poured through the windows.

By the time she awoke, the green was like a fog all around her. In her head was the fuzziness of sunny mornings, of impossibly having no war to fight. The person next to her told her to wake up, that it was her watch, but their voice was soft, and even if there was insistence in it there was none in Eris’ world.

The ground was rocky and cold, but it took just a half-thought for her to sit up, to blink her eyes and shiver and lean against Toland. She fit against his shoulder well, in part because he had been leaning over to insist she wake up. _You’ll thank me for the field hide now_ , she thought. He was saying something about it being her watch, and was using far too many words about it.

She looked up at him, wondering suddenly but still too content to be shocked, whether she had startled him. Maybe, because the invective stopped. He kept the gaze of the mask pointed at the outcrop of rock that anchored the hide’s third corner, then reached out to straighten the fabric of her cloak. It had bunched while she slept, so he tugged down the folded fabric at her near shoulder and then very naturally settled his arm around her waist.

She could have grabbed his hand, either to stroke his fingers or to break them where they lay along her hip. The strange clarity was gone now, the vision just a pleasant dream, without a feeling of truth from either the Light or the Darkness. That wasn’t what she wanted, though, not really, and when she reached up it was to hesitate with her hand almost touching his chest.

He leaned closer to her, brushing the side of her helmet with his own, and spoke in the liquid, quiet burr she still mostly hated.

“ _Get out of the blanket fort_.”

Eris startled, and laughed so loudly that she thought half the Moon might have heard her, and Toland pulled away from her so tense and so fast that he twitched when he stopped.

She was still laughing when she got to the entrance, her Ghost flashing in the dark, and looked around with a knife in her hand; she was still laughing when she glanced back at Toland to see him lay down on his back in the same place she had been. His only response was a phlegmy, grumpy sound as soon as his helmet was out of sight. With that at her back, Eris kept watch.


	21. Taken

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> You are Eris Morn. You have been taken.

You are Eris Morn. Crota’s Bane. The one who climbed out from under the rocks. A survivor, a sustainer, a surface on which dust gathers but does not weaken the strata beneath.

You have been taken.

Remember your two eyes. Rest. Your memories surround you like furs. The people who stood beside you stand beside you again.

What do you see? What landscapes do you map? For such a long time, you have been only your eyes, nothing more and nothing less. You watch the Hidden, watch the Guardians, watch what was and what has been and what will be as all of them swirl together. They are fault lines in the stone of you.

Take back your comfort. Embrace your strong foundations.

You need not be unmoored.

There is a knife for you. It is shaped like [history].

Take up the knife. See the true paths. Take your new shape.


	22. Two Swords

Two swords.

The Void-blade and the Taken blade, both of them corrupt, both of them purified, side by side on a table. Kass holds Impossible Machined hands over the black sword, the precise waves of it governed by fields of causality, by the lips of the universe trying to close over the teeth of it.

She wants to tuck her hands under her arms, can’t. The glow of the Traveler is diluted, building in her images of the black, creeping apertures studded with silver, climbing the towers of the City and reaching up, stretching more and more fingers out of that terrible, muzzled, inside-out mouth -

The Taken apertures are the world skinned.

And she’s going to go to war with this in her hands.

“It’s like Cayde says.” Her Ghost flickers black flanges from over her shoulder. “Don’t overthink it.”


	23. Names

He calls her many things, until he settles on _dearest_ or runs out of words ( _celestial starkness_ is spoken, noun or adjective or object or any one of the parts of speech, and then he stops, embarrassed, and shows just a _glimmer_ of self-awareness). Many things and many people are _dearest_ to him, half-mocking and half-sincere and half-blind. He brings Eris names like a cat brings dead birds.

His name feels ugly in her mouth - neither she nor anyone else seems able to decide where to put the emphasis on it, can’t decide if it’s strange or mundane. She calls him _the shattered one_ as an honorific, like the Stoic or the Speaker, and does not think that she is trying to avoid anything: not the sibilance of _the vitreous_ nor the plainness of _Toland_ nor the screaming, secret language of the Hive. She calls him as little as possible, and commands the silence.


	24. Touch of Malice

He speaks to her in sigils and suggestions. When Oryx dies, when his death rings like a sour note through the universe, the shattered one sends her a message that rises like a fog out of the morning. 

_So pass that gun, that weapon, into someone else’s hands!  
_

Eris can almost see him straightening his shoulders in affront.

_I don’t begrudge you strangers.  
_

_It is not the progression which the Hive fear, but the stalling. That gun feeds on itself, back and forth through ontoformic whirlpools. They carry it into spaces they think they know.  
_

“Their light goes far,” Eris whispers. No Guardians begrudge her that either. No one finds it strange that Crota’s Bane lifts her arms toward the ceiling, the green glow in one hand like a cocoon. Eris knows the doorways and in-between spaces of the Hive. She knows enough to reach out, to feel a croaking intake of breath and tentative hands at her wrists. 

Eris says, “What we could have built will not be built.” 

More affront, more distance. Then, 

_Oryx’s touch also burns the Hive princelings, the scorned successors, the insect lords making war-room maps of ant hills. The Guardians will wield it with … panache. I am curious to see their workings.  
_

Eris lowers her hands. Thinks, just thinks, no songs or messages written in fog: _But you will not._

 


	25. Vanguard

Ikora Rey could hear the Dreadnaught almost-thinking.   
  
People wondered, sometimes, how the Warlock Vanguard could stand there at the top of the Tower: the Guardians’ thoughts were loud, and Ikora did not hesitate to request with whisper or loudspeaker when she needed Guardians to muffle themselves. Think of purple cloth woven with gold, Ikora would say. Think of wooden cornerstones and the cool, shadowed steel latticework on the underside of bridges. The Guardians received the meditative benefits, and Ikora enjoyed the silence like a pleasant view.   
  
This was part of why she always found it easy to travel alone. If there were no other Guardians accompanying her, she could focus on the mission, on precision, on the nuclear fire of the sun in her hands and behind her eyes. Ikora Rey took to the Vanguard like a lighthouse keeper took to the lens.  
  
The Dreadnaught, though.   
  
The Dreadnaught hummed like a broken machine, thoughts turning over and over. It was not so much inhabited as consumed with the drive to blindly observe. Not a roommate, but a stranger the roommate let in, an unfamiliar shape. The Dreadnaught was built for invasion and containment, and even after it had already invaded, already contained Oryx’s realm, it still did that work.   
  
Ikora scouted, although the beacons had already been planted. Her boots made scuffling sounds against the loose dirt of the strangely wild floor. Someone needed to research these bronze-black halls, or at least a fraction of them, before the rest of the Guardians came in, or, Light forbid, Shaxx got ideas about Crucible matches held over abysses. Crota's killer had done good work here. The Guardians would be the scouts, but Ikora --  
  
There was green light in the distance, flowing down, a trickle of water tumbling over uneven spillways --  
  
Ikora also had to know.  
  
She shouldered her gun, shouldered her curiosity, shouldered her way around a corner and strode when nothing lunged, splashing, out of the swampy black puddle under the bridge.   
  
"Record those statues.”  
  
Her Ghost chirped and floated over to the slickly shining wall. "I'm beginning to think one would have to be a little bit mad to understand the Hive,” it said. “The acausal architecture here is baffling."  
  
Ikora moved to the end of the hallway, and smiled at its companionship when the Ghost joined her, flanges flicking closed and open.   
  
"Oh," her Ghost said. "This is big."  
  
The green light was spilling over an outcropping ahead, but she knew what the Ghost meant. Space was folded up inside the Dreadnaught, Oryx's ascendant realm turned inside out and packed into its hull. Eris had told Ikora what she might expect in the way of delusions and traps, had told her in an diagrammatic Hunter way, going point by point through the horrors. This core, though, this seed -- Eris hadn't mentioned that, or not in so many words. She had spoken more of symbols than of geography.   
  
Ikora stepped onto the balcony.   
  
The energy of the ship wasn't generated here, Ikora knew; there were engines, there were poles, dedicated to doing that. This charged something less physical, something newer. Instead of being the heart of the Dreadnaught, the poisoned floor in front of her was some kind of muscle, partially unstrung from its body. Dizzy, she stepped back from the ledge and from her spiraling contemplation of its working.  
  
Ikora carefully measured her own curiosity. That was what got Warlocks, after all: the arrogance of decision, the obsession with order, the impossible panopticon.   
  
“There's a barrier here, or a cap ... " her Ghost hovered tentatively to the ledge, then moved slowly back and forth like a diver readying for the jump. "A lot of energy could funnel through here, but right now, it's ... contained."  
  
"Those statues might activate the portal." Ikora scowled at the gateway in the distance.  
  
"And what comes out?"  
  
“Whatever it is, I bet it isn’t worse than Oryx.”   
  
She read the place, though; she and her Ghost both scanned and examined. Ikora sorted through the insistent, mad thought-sounds of the Dreadnaught. She sampled and sniffed and listened, made that background heat-death hum as loud as it could be in her ears. The Vanguard kept her senses alert for Hive, for Cabal, or for enthusiastic Guardians and found none of those things. She braved the gently hissing poison, kicked through it ankle-deep, sat at the cold mouth of the portal and returned to the ledge in two thumping quick jumps while her Ghost clicked at her side. Ikora knew that all energy lead to Oryx in that place. Her Guardians lived to work and to research and to squabble, and they would do those things here until they echoed.  
  
Ikora turned her back to the poison. This was a job for teams, for people who had time to decipher the statues (or to just symbol-match them, to play their games.) Let this be Shaxx’s. (She sighed, knowing that even he wouldn’t take this for the Crucible.) Her Warlocks would return to her with information, and she would learn.   
  
Letting the Court go in this way, listening to the dimming mutter of its motives, Ikora lost the dangerous fascination of it and forced it to silence, just as she had practiced.


	26. Visual Impressions Approximate

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A friend and I were discussing whether Eris was actually Taox. I don't think that's likely to be literally true, but it was fun to play around with a sort of body-sharing AU.

A record of a moment, already changed at the instant it is made, unverified. Visual impressions approximate.   
  
Eris Morn feels across the table for the book, loses her grip in the pages, then flips it onto its back. The [tan?] pages are [a solid block of her own flesh-color?]  
  
She says, “Were you so blind in your world?”  “No. The light was very different. A pity the light wasn’t also trapped in that skin you took.”  
  
“If we had known … ”  
  
Taox [scowls?] “You respected enough to wear our face. I know how it is between prey and conquerer.”  
  
“This is not respect.” Eris [moves her mouth?]   
  
“Won’t you remember the others? The children, Eris, the ones who wanted to learn — “  
  
“You would have killed them.”  
  
“The scale was also different. Does it matter, now that we’re blind or mad or dead or one of us has fallen into the other?”  
  
“It _does_ , if it helps us to see.”  
  
[Taox looks back at her from the pages, ink crusting her third eye, a spiral caught in a square (the Ascendant Realm within the Dreadnaught) bent out of 90 degrees by the edge of her cheek?]


	27. Hunting

The first time Eris sees him he’s wearing his mask, so for a long time when she pictures him, out of Eriana’s warnings or her own curiosity, there is just the rumpled plastic where the shattered one's face should be. Once she sees the way the scar on his cheek points down toward his heart. Once he sits, sweating and irritable, in the heat of the back room while Omar and Vell play a Byzantine board game shirtless in the front room. Eris works her boots off. Toland sits there still masked, digging his fingers under his collar, and she wonders whether he’s hiding stranger scars.

Once, the two of them hunt for energetic artifacts of the Hive just outside the Wall. Summer is cold evenings, snow-blinding on the distant mountains, and full of predators. Eriana is at a meeting of the Praxic Warlocks. Toland stops to sit, his Ghost exhausted or his distracted anger peaking, and tugs the morbid helmet off. Pulls his fingers through his knotted hair in frustrated jabs that obviously hurt him. There are black bands lost in the black hair, used to tie it under his helmet. Sai suffered the same thing. Eris has Hunter’s hands and so she interrupts him.

 His hair spilling through her fingers, Toland tucks himself against her chest and strokes her legs, arranging them just so around him while her vision blurs with want and fury as his touch skirts her hips or his own legs. His fingers are kind and precise, and so are hers as she works at the fraying tangles in his hair. Her helmet is still on, giving her the HUD and some tiny sense of privacy even as she brushes his hair out and arranges it unknotted around his shoulders. The idea of settling her hands baffles her.

But he leans back, pushing her dangerously down toward the grass, and lifts a hand to knock on the side of her helmet: it’s an insistent approval or a wordless grumbling or both, probably; he’s a constant state of both. It shifts his hips against her legs, and she sighs in that same tolerant irritation and rests her hands on the ground. Predators, she thinks. Dangerous things in the woods, skulking in the wrecks of ships.

So she pats his side and stands, and hands the helmet to him while he ties his hair up in the loose knots that unraveled in the first place, and they keep hunting. She realizes hours later that he was silent.


	28. Morning People

“We should go,” he said sleepily. “There is singing in the next cavern.”

Toland leaned over her, unmasked and stained with ichor. It had not been like this before the pit, Eris thought. He was close enough to kiss now, but when their team had worked in the hideout in the city he had held himself separate. Toland had first claim to the cot because he was in exile, but also because he worked at the desk there anyway, and because his attitude lingered in the room like a smell.

So, on the few nights the whole group had stayed there, tired from research or needing to cling to one another, most of them had used the single couch and the shelving in the front room. Eriana, usually prim, who lay like an organic being in her bed in the Tower when she studied, sat by the bookshelves to charge, constantly flicking her foot in Eris’ direction, just brushing her ankle. On that particular day, Eris had fallen asleep sitting almost straight up, her arms folded over her chest on the couch and her back to the second room. Next to her, Vell and Omar, half-armored and leaning.

Sai had been restless that night, had moved around between the shelves and the couch. Once she put her head on Eris’ ankles, just under the place where Eriana’s feet touched, and quickly declared herself uncomfortable. Afterward she leaned against the back of the couch, the sound of her breath gentle in Eris’ ear, one arm halfway around Omar’s neck and the other poised, never touching, to tap encoded messages against the air next to his armored shoulder.

In the morning, Eriana had been curt but alert; Vell had been silent and groggy. Omar was a morning person, already studying the records for Hunter techniques he felt would help him in the pit. Sai was asleep, stretched across the couch with her feet up on the arm.

Eris ached from sleeping on stone and from being mortal.

She sat up and felt for a moment as if she was surrounded by them again, their voices and the air they displaced. There was no kindness in the fact that she and Toland had survived. For some incomprehensible reason he was still there, though, not moving, staring at her with alien eyes as she sat up into his dismissive embrace. When she looked at him she saw all of them now, in the prisms and cracks of her ill-adjusted, grafted eyes.

Whatever Toland saw in her expression, it roused but did not awaken him. He leaned over to kiss her ear, the center of it, so that she could hear the soft pop of his breath and the squelch of thick, clotted ichor on both their skins. Maybe, in another reality, Eriana would have smashed straight through the ceiling of the pit like a golden meteor, and none of them would have gotten lost in the maze.

Now, though, Toland’s languid resolve sank her deeper into the sounds of the pit; the water dripping, the scrape of armor against stone, and also the sound that had woken her up in the first place, before Toland moved. She crawled over his legs to get to a path more comfortable for her to stand in. “We will go,” she said. “Their voices … I hear them in the walls.”


	29. Fundament

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Set in the AU where Eris and Toland adopt several Hive children and go looking for the origins of the krill.

“Say it again.” The storm over Fundament’s made and remade sea is gray and blue, and /Light/ she has wanted to hear those words. Out of all the codes and songs that she has waited for as they passed solar systems and world-sized storms like this, they shiver her the most.

Toland props his chin on the top of her head and makes a disgusted, phlegmatic sigh in the back of his throat. He has to prepare for this; he has to pick up speed for it. “I was wrong.”


	30. Ghost Fragment: Hunter 2

“What do quantum states have to do with me and this knife?”

“Stop waving it for a minute, right? The universe is like the froth on the top of the waves.”

“I know.”

“Golden Age physicists built on - What?”

“…”

“You said you know."

“Now that you put it that way. It’s what I’ve been saying all along. Everything is a point of change. Just like the edge of the knife.”


	31. Things Eris Morn Almost Remembers

1\. Before or after? Eris does not always remember, because time whirlpools around Crota’s world such that all times are just distances away from her time in it. Toland was feverish, maybe, or drained by something he had let be done to him. His Ghost also whirled, concerned, minute-by-minute rebuilding. Toland spoke to all of them of kaleidoscopic visions, of rune-cut stones unearthed and reburied in sequence. He spoke to Eris of a carefully nurtured spite, while Eriana watched from over his shoulder with her arms folded and her eyes wide with impatient concern. Before the pit, then. Toland had still had his eyes.  
  
2\. He told her that electrons were the unwilling serfs of a victorious nucleus-god. She told him that perhaps 'thralls' was a better word, more precise, although easy to confuse with the Guardians’ names for the underdeveloped Hive forms. Unwilling priests, she suggested. He reared back.  
  
(After. His body language became more pronounced after he died, because his eyes were no longer expressive.)  
  
3\. “Breakfast,” Omar said.   
  
From the couch, muffled beneath a beaded pillow: “All things … consume … or are consumed …?”  
  
Before.  
  
4\. Hunters know the ways. Ley lines, life lines, strings vibrating underneath the ground. These she followed on the moon, with Omar beside her and Toland trailing after. This was during the pit, unarguably, stamped in her memory like a date on a calendar. She figured out how to unlock gates with a chip of bone and some leverage. Gold light gleamed off of copper untouched by oxidization. Still, there was so much green.  
  
5\. Toland sang to her of definitions, primers, words that unpacked and unfolded into Hive-references that would have taken hours and hours in Guardians’ words. She explained them to him anyway, while she lay with her head on his shoulder and they debated interpretations and inflections. Each translation created new puzzles, new patterns, words interlacing while gloved hands caught and play-fought and caught again.  
   
After.  
  
6\. Mare Imbrium had been Eriana’s fury. The Hive had not been personal to Eris, or at least not until Eriana gathered her team for that first night. They had planned until morning, and then, with the feeling that a covenant had been made between the six and the legions, they kept planning, Eris aware all along that there was loss in this already, loss sinking into it like blood, Wei Ning’s colors on Eriana’s armor, a frightened Vanguard, and Eris, angry, ready to fight -   
  
Before or after? Eris does not always remember, because time whirlpools around Crota’s world, and all times are just distances away from her time in it.


	32. Nightstalker

“Wait, Guardian. One more thing. One more thing about Tevis. You’d think Hunters like to be alone. And we do - we’ll take the treks, long patrols, all of that. But that’s with the knowledge that the Tower has our backs. The lone wolf operates outside the structure of a pack, not without the structure entirely, and that distinction is important.

“You’d think Warlocks like to be alone too, but truth in fact it’s impossible for a Warlock to be alone. Ever. They’ve always got those thoughts, those voices of people they met the day before or the week before, even if they don’t have actual voices in their head from some dusty artifact. Warlocks cannot be alone.

“Titans like to be alone. It fits with their ideas about honor, about one lone person with their gun and their back to a really big wall. Titans are gregarious, but they think being alone is cool, and they feel good when they do it.

"Weird stuff happens when Hunters are that alone. I mean hey, look at Eris.

"Tevis got into a bad spot, and I blame no one for that. But I bet, at the end, he was very lonely.

"Keep that in mind, Hunter. Vanguard can always be found.”


	33. The Pit

Eris Morn sees the thrall horde running and does everything wrong. 

They come for her fast, eyeless, aiming by smell for the edge of the cliff. Rocks tumble off into the void behind her. Before the first one hits she slams her back against the wall and reaches out for the fading Light. Her grasp is slippery, but so is the floor. 

Four thralls stampede over the edge of the cliff, clawed hands flailing inches from her face. A fifth rips at her cloak and she stabs it in the neck. A sixth jumps. 

Eris wrenches the body to the side and looks over its twitching shoulder. Thrall six scrabbles for purchase in the middle of the square pit to her right, clawing at nothing. Its gaze is pointed at the crumbling, but sealed, wall on the other side. 

The moment it falls, Eris smiles with teeth. “There.” 

Theory confirmed, bravery proven, home found. These things are all the same. Crota’s world rewards deaths. Maybe the floating pathway was there before, maybe it was not. 

She jumps. Lands where the thrall had scrabbled and paces, finding the edges. The floor occasionally flares with golden cracks, but it is mostly invisible, open to the black drop below. Maybe if her Ghost had been alive she would have been able to see it; as it is, she works by feel. She is still developing the senses her new eyes gave her, so her vision is still blurry and smarting. Now that the attack is over, it hurts again. 

When she turns around, there is a new dark shape against the shadowed pit. Toland, dead, sung back to some Ghostless kind of life, sits cross-legged on the invisible stone. Maybe he would have praised or criticized her if she hesitated; maybe he is tired too, a suggestion of a shadow under a ragged wizard’s cloak. He is only ever partially embodied. 

When she sits, though, she feels the thump and hears the swish of the cloak across her shoulders. They are working according to the plan. He will keep watch second. 

When he lays down he starts to speak and she covers his mouth with her hand. His skin feels insubstantial, and fuzzy like static. There is no suggestion of the furrows between his eyes, or of his nose. She who judged the distance between the invisible floor and the thrall so precisely has the unsettling feeling that she is reaching through him. 

“A short rest,” she says, because she does not know yet that they will all be short. Because she is keeping watch she props her face against his arm and flinches against the pain in her ruined eyes. He covers her with the cloak and presses his own distorted face against her shoulder, and they make themselves small over the void. She will remember the terror of this later; how cold it became, how uncomfortable, the drop, the shrieking and falling of other thralls. The false morning, Crota’s morning, hours later, when the thralls called the wizard. She thinks Toland remembers the rest overmuch, and as if from above - the microcosm under the cloak, the stink of her breath, the protective pit.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This was originally planned as part of a larger story about Eris remembering her time with Toland after everyone else died in the pit. That larger story idea has changed a lot since.


	34. consume consume consume

Day One.

She talks to her Ghost. The virus is obvious, creeping up the walls, but she had gotten used to that quickly. At least, if it was encroaching on her, it wasn’t out there; Lady Joldur had quickly resigned herself to being a bastion. Not the first to hold her own but not the last, either.

Year One.

She thinks of the storms in the hills and of spears breaking against the walls and makes herself into both, and when her Ghost tells her that walls can be broken and weather patterns change (she is infected now, her eyes bloodshot, the Ghost repairing still) Joldur shrugs and remembers the fires in Felwinter’s Peak, now banked, and digs her foot against the ground. Barely an inch now, between her and the door.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Written based on the Rise of Iron trailer, but not, to my delight, completely contradicted by the canon.


	35. Iron Song

“There was a saying,” Lord Saladin said. “A coward dies a thousand deaths, but a brave man dies just one.”

Although he looked tall carrying the literal or metaphorical Iron Banner, Kass was nearly his height; she could almost look down on Saladin’s graying temples. The sun-sword hung on her back, heavy and dormant.

“Silimar and I used to talk about it. We hated it. How it’s backwards. How men and women of the light had a noble calling to fight,” Saladin continued. “Warlords took their territories and then grew lazy, and thought they were brave. We always died more just before we defeated them.”

Somewhere above them, a wolf howled in the thin, cold air and a Guardian flung herself off the summit.

“There was more to that writing.” Kass said gently, automatically. “Everything dies, and it would be squandering some of life to fear it.”

“That’s just it, pup. The battlefield changes, but some things stay the same.”


	36. Grace in their Making

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ikora/Shaxx trade with jencforcarolina.

Once-Lord Shaxx caught Not-Yet-Vanguard-Ikora watching one of his own matches once, an early one when he was testing the Crucible. When he was testing it as an excuse to show younger Guardians what he could do, he corrected himself, and stood beside her.

He could see the tablet over her shoulder, while on the screen a younger Shaxx pulled another Titan into a bear hug. Ikora smiled over her shoulder. The Titan dropped his weight and tried to unbalance them both, but Shaxx hit him and that was the end of the match. Ikora looked startled - there was a slight arch to her eyebrows when she was startled, unmistakable - and Shaxx felt like he was the one who had been hit. He boomed out some platitude, because he could do that on autopilot, and had to remind himself not to run.

* * *

“That Warlock’s gone in by herself.”

“By _herself_?”

“The rest of the team’s just standing there.”

Once-Lord Shaxx caught the chatter from one of the live feeds and watched. It was all true: there was one Warlock out there like a whole team, running between abandoned buildings and narrow streets with lightning in one hand and a shotgun in the other. He noticed with a gut-punch intensity that she had mud on the edge of her cloak, black splatters, endearingly shabby.

She took the other team apart.

* * *

With Saladin back, nothing stayed in its grave any more.

Eva gave Shaxx a bag of candy for the Guardians, which he piled by the skull on his table and promptly ignored. The Festival was a good time to banter in the Tower, though. So many Guardians he didn’t see often, from Crucible veterans to timid scholars, took from that bag and talked to him a while. Memories were given, graves aired out.

Ikora was so good to them. Even though she should not have been wasted politicking, she was a good fit for the Vanguard. It was to their credit that none of the Vanguard really wanted the job, anyway. It wasn’t bad to have her in the Tower, there, teaching.

* * *

Ikora left a book beside the candy on his table. It was thin, six pages laced together. The edges were as straight as if they had been cut with a razor, but the text and drawings seemed to have been pulled out of a larger volume. One date was written at the top of the first page - a date back in his storming days, he realized after a moment. The sketches were penciled with a light touch and cross-hatching, and showed himself and other masked and armed Guardians. One Titan was mid-leap, power drawn around their armor in quick, almost angry slashes of charcoal. A Hunter crouched small, the curl of their cloak smudged as if it had been redrawn and erased many times. He could picture Ikora’s quizzical serenity as she drew.

The sketch of Shaxx was small, as if from a distance. Notes crowed around it, equations, creeds and Crucible maps he recognized. Most of the page was taken up by text. The lines were stronger than on most of the other sketches though, doubled and tripled to give him a deeply shadowed left side, as if she had gone over it many times.  

* * *

Lord Shaxx left a square of chocolate on the Vanguard’s table. When he touched the wrapper, it crackled with lightning.


	37. Dream-Future, Dream-Past

In the pit she had a knife, scavenged from Hive in-fighting. It was a black blade, the length of her forearm. In the dream, Toland pulled it out of his shoulder.   
  
He wore fieldweave, and in the dream she could see the individual filaments firing. Blue strings flared, cut. She had never warn Warlock gear, did not know what that energy was like, but she felt as if the weave was calibrating, balancing itself out again, thinking on its own.   
  
Toland was not balanced.   
  
In the dream he threw the back knife at her with a bloody, indifferent hand. It disappeared just before it would have hit her, into a fog made from her apprehension.   
  
“You aren't here,” Eris said. In the dream, they both held swords.  
  
Then they were in a library. The Speaker’s perch, Eris thought, a sacred place in which they should not be fighting, should not be strewing pit-dust on the floors. Toland leaned against the table, his wound healed, a void-black rapier sweeping the ground at his feet and throwing up sparks. Eris’ blade was a thin, shadowy needle that flashed with green.   
  
“Can we _be_ placed?” he said. “Did we ever leave?”  
  
She raised the sword. In dreams she did not remember anything, just knew. Perceptions of her past did not feel like perceptions of her past but rather knowledge dropped, complete, into a newly-formed mind. So, she knew that she had embraced him once, her forehead against his shoulder where the cut had been.  
  
In the dream Eris was the one who killed Oryx. She stood in a shrinking bubble of space and futures and fought and fought and fought with her green needle, cutting out futures like slices of meat.  
  
In the dream she saw Taox. Eris knew somehow that this was the teacher, the empire-builder, the wise traitor who was lost and lost her way in turn. She stood in front of an old man with a white worm in his flake-scaled arms and said, “Come on, stand up, here is still some more time until the end.”


	38. "onrush of conclusion like the cold salt tide"

    The first time Eris saw Toland he was staring through the gap between the latch and the door frame, suspicious and suspected, with Eriana about to break down his door.  
  
   _(He thought she was quiet, the masked Hunter in green, and wondered what game she hunted.)_  
  
    The first time she felt something for him she fled the apartment. The team had been talking, rushed and scared, and she had been staring at his hands. Everyone except Toland had been leaving anyway, so Eris had had an excuse.  
  
     _(He watched her fingers brush the spines of dusty, useless books.)_  
  
    Almost every time they kissed was in the pit. It was a tentative, desperate soft gasp and she wanted the warmth as much as the love.  
  
     _(He saw her new eyes there too. For some time it was just the glow turning her into a monstrous thing, and then they passed beside a lantern and she turned to look at him, or because she caught something on the wind. He raised a hand to the bloody edge between the chitin and her skin, the tracks that were not quite stitches. He hoped helplessly that she had not suffered, and then imagined licking the blood away. His own face looked the same.)_  
  
    The first time she sensed him move in the ascendant realm it was a surge like a wave, or a tug as if the world had peeled off like skin and there had been a second world, larger and brighter, underneath. It was the world in which her friends had lived, and he embodied it. She sighed and tried, tried to close her eyes and fall back into that world and then she recognized the echo of him in it. Without the Sun, without the Void, it was a strange negative shape which held her.  
  
_(Dearest Eris,_  
  
_Let me speak to you of new philosophies …)_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "One the challenge has been made, the glove thrown down with all the force ritual can manage, the wager accepted, nothing can be done at all but to wait for the onrush of conclusion like the cold salt tide." 
> 
> Catherynne Valente


	39. 4.353

 

VANGUARD TRANSMISSION 4.353: Ikora Rey to Commander Zavala, Cayde-6: Please find attached recent research into the nature of the Hive Overworld. If we can figure out how to remove this entity from the protective throne realm we can do the same for the Hive queens.

* * *

 

Eris Morn addresses the Vanguard, 4.357: Toland the Shattered is susceptible to many forms of attack: personal, philosophical, sartorial. Physical attack remains the most difficult and possibly least effective of these. I recommend further experimentation on the terrible Dreadnaught instead of an effort which our quarry will find, at worst, amusing.

I can sing the songs and tones which resonate in the other plane. The place is accessible. But death there only sends more energy to the wounded remnants of Oryx’s hierarchy.

Tell him that the tone he identified for the third name is a remnant of an older Hive victory chant, and therefore loses a bit of its power to broken and stagnant channels each time he speaks it. This will, as it is said, tick him off.

* * *

 

???? TRANSMISSION, INTERCEPTED: ???? to Eris Morn: It’s a witch hunt, dearest.

* * *

 

TOWER ANNOUNCEMENT: Guardians exploring the Dreadnaught may experience garbled signal due to [unintelligible]

* * *

 

VANGUARD TRANSMISSION 4.360: Ikora Rey to Commander Zavala, Cayde-6: The Guardian’s mission has provided us with very valuable information about a possible push into the Ascendant Plane. We could stop Oryx’s successors before they begin.

Please thank Eris for her assistance. No need to thank the other one. Either way it will just, as they say, tick him off.


	40. The Dawning

The jagged form of the distant queen in the smoke sits back on a three-story throne, and Eris rubs the black-jeweled bracelet against her own wrist. It’s a tense audience, and Toland is brimming with nervous energy beside her, but that’s always the case.

“You’re late,” says Savathun.

Eris is used to being emissary to an inpatient sovereign. She does not show any emotion except for the deepening of her frown, does not shake her head to rattle the glowing crystals wrapped around her bared horns.

Toland snaps, “We’re busy. The Tower is crawling with Dawning revelers on petty errands.”

“What? Why?” Savathun’s words are backed with screeches, adding ontological significance and time markers to the simple words.

“The Dawning,” Eris says, “is a time of giving and receiving gifts.”

A fruitless gesture, she thinks, but at least it casts forward instead of back.

“And did you think this did not concern me?” Savathun leans back and forth like a snake waiting to strike. “I should give you gifts, in honor of your lateness. We will feed our tithes together.”  
  
Before Eris can protest, Savathun waves a hand. “Take these.”

Thralls swarm out of the shadows. Just seconds later, Murmur and Bad Juju are smoking, and Eris can feel the energy radiating toward Savathun and then circling back, sinking into the gulf where her and Toland’s Light had once been. Toland checks his ammo and smirks over the dead.

He tucks the gun under his arm as he bows. “We thank you for this gift of death.”

“In return, you will be prompt.”

“We will work according to our wills,” Eris says, a predictably, blandly belligerent non-answer with which Savathun is satisfied. It doesn’t do to suggest that the Hive queen is actually negotiating with the Tower, even if it has been an unspoken and obvious truth since the start.

They turn their backs. Toland hooks his elbow around hers, armor against armor. He wears soft, green clawed gloves on his left hand and a railroad spike blade on the other arm; Eris wears the opposite. They open and close door after door between one plane and the other; they talk of treaties and Savathun’s manipulations. They wish one another a deathless Dawning.


	41. Burn It All

Eris looks at the moon and hates and hates and hates.

  
“It’s beautiful tonight.” Guardians on the balcony act like she isn’t there.

  
“You can barely see it past the Traveler!”

  
One of them is young; the other one is teasing. “You want to go and see the other dead? It isn’t as dangerous as it used to be.”

  
“Maybe another night.”

  
No voices from the moon, no signal from beyond. The silence and the talk both madden her. Eris is just beginning to see those far shores differently: not gray but orange. Crota is dead, but he was a prince, and princeliness implies kingdom.

  
“Watch for the tides,” she whispers. Whispers carry, but things don’t usually scream after them. Whispers allow her to regret her words with more force. “That’s when they bite.”

  
The Guardians laugh nervously (at each other, not at her) and leave. The moon is full. Eris raises her hands up, regrets, does not close her eyes, and presents herself to the world she wants to burn.


	42. Towerfall (Before)

Her nightmares are muddled, but sometimes she can pick things out.

Things Eris feared before the Pit: the deaths of her friends, rustles in the city, the fall of the Tower.

Things Eris fears after the Pit: growing old, tooth-rot and other infection, the fall of the Tower.

She prefers to think of the fears as nightmare rather than prophecy, but the distinction is not always clear. Toland told her to think of them as the spark inside a gun. He feared towerfall too, all the while professing to have judged its people already and found them wanting. They would not escape. Not like her. 

Both of them know she is a survivor. He worships that certainty. She remains a Guardian in unlife, a walking martyr, but she knows it too, and it helps her sleep.


	43. Towerfall (After)

Eris Morn does not need an anchor. She can fold the world effortlessly, wrapping it around ancient knowledge that still feels new. It follows its own rules, and in those maps are waypoints.

  
Toland, jester-king of his own literarchy, is a waypoint.

  
Eris’ emanations are strong here, like a cloak around her shoulders. Toland looks at her from a pillar of cloud flashing with green eyes. “Dearest Eris. You have joined me in my vaulted halls! Welcome. So … the lie has fallen away. Did you leave your Guardian behind?”

  
“The Guardian, and Asher Mir the Gensym Scribe, and Ikora, and … so many.”

  
“So it is your time to hear the song.”

  
“I have not died a third time.” She reaches out, and cannot touch the cloud of him. Grief and relief mingle. “But the lie … the smokescreen. I go to find the fire.”

  
Toland flickers. He isn’t self-aware enough to compare this to his betrayal, Eris thinks. Should I? He has heard the whispers she has, the warnings the Vanguard did not.

  
But she is hunting, and the hunt does not end at the home of this confidante.

  
“Did we not know that the truth brings conflict?” He says. It is a mercy that he does not continue. The battles around her are flames in a conflagration, and she will walk through them to fight the foes she knows best.

  
Eris and Toland never did say goodbye to one another. It had been that way from the start. They bow their heads to one another with memories of other days, other bodies, and Eris goes.


	44. Towerfall (Elysium)

There was comfort for a while. There were scraps from feasts of black shellfish and tiny, soft white fungi; Toland courted Savathûn’s lieutenants in the literal sense of the word and ate at their tables. Eris subsisted this way, and of course one point on her journey into the underdark had become a rest of days or weeks once she had tasted it.

“I knew,” she had said with such certainty. She had known that something was coming to Earth, to the whole world and to the Tower. Toland had focused on the pure knowledge instead of its quiddity, and so when she had taken his hands she had been swayed that way too.

They gloried in being both alone and fed. The courts kept them in what felt like opulence beyond the world. Savathûn’s disregard felt like freedom, and the world was an emerald-curtained palace. Eris offered wormspore to the shattered one and watched while he licked the dust of it from his mouth, circling her fingers on her own knee. When he offered back the stems she pulled him to her and hit his cheek with the back of her hand. She might have reddened the skin in another world. Here the pain twisted his expression, graying skin over teeth gone transparent at the edges, and dug a yearning sound out of his throat, and when he kissed her she tasted the Pit.

Later she stood beside a window onto a burning plain, silk wrapped around bare shoulders. Black tears tickled her throat, but she barely felt their cold weight.

"The Hidden will seal up around my place like a healing wound,” she murmured.

She couldn’t see Toland as he stood, but the shuffling steps conjured him hunched and crooked.

“They built their houses on a fault and did not expect the earth to move,” he said.

"But when it does …” Or did? Had it happened already?

Toland moved to her side and she nestled against him. She had thought of doing this when they first met again, when he arrived with an entourage and she realized that they were both equally bodiless now. Smoke to smoke she embraced him with a possessiveness that did not mourn her fireteam any more, and did not quite mourn the Tower. It had been a long time since he had lived in those walls and so he was emblematic of only himself. Guilt muddled with more useful feelings - determination to find a knifing way to Savathûn’s throat, and a bit of vindication.

Maybe that was Toland’s victory.

Eris breathed in the cold air of the throneworld. She would take this - but she would take sparingly of its victory and its food.


	45. "Boo!"

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A prompt: Fireteam Heartbreak + "Boo!"

Wei Ning collared Eris during a clear-skied sunset in spring. Pulled her around a Tower corner with Titan grace, the heavy kind that looked deceptively clumsy. “Shh.”

  
Eris had halfway wriggled her scarf out of her grip. “What are you doing?”

  
“I’m going to scare her.”

  
There was no question as to who, and besides, Eriana’s blue Ghost had just drifted around the corner. “Why look at that,” it said.

  
Wei Ning leapt around the corner. Eris smoothed her scarf and hastily followed.

  
With a sound like metal scraping, Eriana doubled over in laughter. Wei’s own golden Ghost was bobbing at Eriana’s shoulder, its eye-light half shut in mirth.

  
“You traitor,” Wei said, mock-furious, to her hovering Ghost.

  
Her Ghost flicked her flanges and settled closer to Eriana’s shoulder. “She saw us well before you went around the corner.”

  
Eriana scooped her own Ghost into her hands. “So you’re the traitor.”

  
“Yes,” Eris said, smiling. “We’re all very treacherous for spotting our friends.”

  
“The inconvenience of autonomous souls,” Eriana murmured, and Wei stared at her in bald-faced awe, and Eris silently thanked her own, silent Ghost that they had a Hunter to take care of them.


	46. Sunlight

“Have you read this?” Kass waved a datapad at Guile-11. She recognized him from that brief mentorship in the Cosmodrome, but for now his identity was secondary. More importantly, he was standing in front of Eris’ miscellanea-strewn table.

  
“She isn’t talking to me,” Guile said, shaking his spiked head. “I just need to buy …”

  
Kass read the lunar interdict. “Guardians with an accurate assessment of losses in the recent days … ”

  
She thought the words might jar something for Eris, but the former Guardian did not regard either of her visitors. Instead, she was talking to the ether. Green and gold motes swirled around her as the thing in her hands sparked.

  
“…or with intelligence on the nature and method of hostile resistance, should report to the Vanguard immediately.”

Kass trailed off. “I thought this might be … ” Of interest to you, she did not say. It would feel like a lie. About you, she did not say.

  
“Cold,” Eris said. “He is cold there, but he clothes himself in wings of flame and … is bidden.”

  
Kass felt strange resonations in the Voidlight, as if someone had replied to Eris in a language the Warlock did not understand. Eris hunched, hurt or overcome or engaged in her usual regal strangeness.

A moment later, though, she looked up at Guile and reached out a graceful hand. He fumbled wormspore.

As she traded with him, Eris looked at Kass. Her round, pupilless eyes stared in muted curiosity and even more muted inquisition. There was vibrancy there, and not the glazed vigor of the sleepless. Eris might have nearly died for those eyes, and now she lived fiercely through them.

  
“It was so,” Eris said suddenly. “We remember.”

  
It was a gentle dismissal. Kass held the datapad close. Only as Kass and Guile walked away together did she realize neither of the Guardians had been included in the word ‘we’.


	47. Ghost Fragment: The Last Word 5

The last time he had fled a ruined village he had lost three of nine people, and Shin Malphur hoped to the Light and to his own feet that he would do better this time.

  
Don’t keep everything in one cache, he knew, and he thought that the Vanguard must too. The gun felt no different on his hip, and Cayde nodded dismissively as they both trudged through rubble. Shin circled up with the Vanguard for just a little while, to talk about the Shadows of Yor and about the other non-Hunter Hunter in the Tower. Shin and Eris had compared ghost stories once.

  
“Cayde is sending his Hunters on a treasure hunt,” Ikora said, sanguine and wary.

The Exo shrugged. Their people rallied around them, setting up signal points in advance of future hunts. “The scouts need scouts.”

  
“Where is Eris?” Shin had a feeling he would need to stay on target, to deal with one of his contacts at a time. Some of these Guardians had never lived outside the City before. They were more liable to become distracted by things like a lack of tap water. He would need to take care of them too.

  
For his part, Cayde still looked unconcerned. “I hate to say it, but I don’t know. We know someone who might, though.”

  
Tenuous alliances, broken and mended histories. Shin knew all about this kind of ghost.

  
Ikora told him a place. Not a ritual - he would have rejected the idea outright - but a meeting she would have attended herself if Shin had not conveniently volunteered. He was happy to be her knife, but laid it out clear that he wouldn’t be agreeing to any more clandestine treks sight unseen.

 

* * *

  
Toland stood in a clearing, for any given definition of “stood” and “in”. Reality warped slightly, and he nested in it. Shin kept his hand off the gun just because he thought it wouldn’t be his most effective weapon here. Hunters could be clever, too.

  
If the Shattered One gave any impression of recognizing the Last Word, he didn’t show it. The voice was somehow both wheedling and thick as if with phlegm. “You weren’t born a Guardian. I can smell it on you.”

  
Shin brushed off his pant legs. He had acquired a bit of pungent mud, sure, and ash. So had everyone else.

  
“Isn’t it intoxicating to live … ” But Toland didn’t follow with ‘forever’. “Apart? Hear the language of other places?”

  
“Can’t say I have much truck with words for the sake of words,” Shin said.

  
Loken had lost his way too, and even if Shin felt the same about Toland, he knew what was a parasite on the world and what enriched it.

  
“With what, then?” Toland blurred. “The long hunt? Sometimes Hunters can’t tell when they’re retreating.”

  
Palamon hadn’t been his fault, Shin told himself. Not that particular retreat. Sometimes it was easier to think that it had been, rather than go down the long road toward whatever Jaren was thinking when he fell alone. Better to be responsible for a whole world than responsible for that. Right?

  
Shin looked at the shadow. “You’ve got a way with people.” A flaying way. “I’m here for Eris.”

Toland was nonplussed. “She isn’t. She has gone a-walking.”  
“Safe, then?”

  
“Yes.”

  
“And her information?” Her knowledge of Dredgen Yor’s Ghost, of Shin’s?

  
“Gone with her.”

  
Shin nodded. This time when he rested his elbow on the Last Word it was just that; a rest, a frontier lean. When the trees creaked behind him, it was just convenience (and a bit of well-of-course) that turned the lean into a grasp. The Last Word was so very familiar.

  
The gap around Toland closed, whipping him away and leaving the smell of ash and autumn leaves. There was one loose end tied, although Shin would have liked to talk to Eris about the Shadows. He turned to watch the Cabal forces moving slowly between the trees.

  
Always another chance for words for the sake of others, though, wasn’t there …?


	48. First Birth

A rainforest, the sprite said, one of the re-grown green swaths of the Amazon, and although Toland understood every one of the words, he struggled to connect them to what he saw. Why this patch of dirt? Why the river, moving patiently? He had moved away from it quickly, the idea of predators yet another free-floating concern in his head. His first steps in - how long? The sprite didn't know.

It was one of the only things he didn't recognize, too. Trees were trees. What was this? "Who are you?"

The voice warmed as the little drone's flanges rotated. "I'm your Ghost." And Toland could hear the capital letter.

So he had started walking, following the Ghost or letting it follow him; they traded places, and the road was red and narrow like a vein. The trees pressed in on either side, but something had been here before the two travelers. It had cut the steep-sided path into the red dirt.

The trail was slippery, humid, rocky. Toland sneered as the bottom of his jacket, so heavy it almost felt weighted, slapped against the back of his legs. Where had he gotten this clothing? He picked at the collar, wondering whether he recognized it any more or less than anything else. Questions nagged at him.

Beneath them, though, was a sense that he only identified as comfort in a roundabout sense. A sixth perception he had hardly noticed before rose up around him like a wave when he considered it. It felt deep and then shallow, like clear water riding over rocks and telling him their shapes as if he could feel them with his fingers. He experimented with pushing the wave forward, and felt the flanges of the Ghost twitch in response.

Useful.

Ahead, something on the other side of a tangle of trees pushed back against the wave. Waters mixed, cool and hot. Was temperature the right comparison? Toland counted metaphors on his fingers. Water. Light. Color. Energy. Magnetism. One of them responded.

He followed the path around the tangle, almost forgetting the Ghost in tow until it floated out in front of him. It made an undulating path through the air until it reached the elderly woman kneeling in the clearing in front of a metal dome.

She looked up when she saw the Ghost, revealing a pale blue face behind a cloud of curly white hair. "Where did you come from?"

When she saw Toland she stood up, bracing one hand for a moment on the antennae-studded surface of the downed black satellite. When she smiled, the white patches on her cheeks broke into blue creases. "Ah, you found someone! Welcome! I suppose I don't have to worry about hiding this find from a baby Guardian - you don't know what you've found."

By the time Toland was halfway to figuring out from her genial tone whether he had just been insulted the woman was approaching with a gloved hand outstretched. He clasped it reflexively.

"Happy birthday. I'm Cryptarch Adonna."


	49. Flame

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> More kinderguardian!Toland. A prompt from Hokuton-Punch on tumblr.

“Welcome back, boy. Did you divest yourself of that filament?”   
  
“A Guardian gave me 35 Glimmer for it,” Toland said, holding the handful of silver chips out to where Cryptarch Adonna sat in a sling chair under her awning. Two weeks in the City, and Toland wore a white cloak graying at the edges with the dust of the contested tundra.   
  
The Awoken woman took the chips and deposited them quickly with the others before casting an appraising eye over the day’s trades. “Did you tell them you got them from Brazil?”  
  
“No.” He had forgotten to mention it, and to make up for it in his own mind he had scowled, and the Guardian had looked at him like he was something wild. The Guardian bought the filament.   
  
“They would have given you more! But it’s all right. The worthiness of the artifact is what matters, and we didn’t need that filament. Come see what we do need.”  
  
Toland sat by the cart while Guardians and civilians walked by, and the Cryptarch showed him a pair of boots scuffed up from the road, crackling with electric energy from the heels. “From the Golden Age, probably, but kitbashed together toward the end. Sewn up again for war. You’ll learn more as we go.”  
  
“Of course, Cryptarch. The weapons and the accoutrements of war.”   
  
“They’re fascinating work; the needles had to be sized just so. Here you can see I have them in sets, metal in one, wood in the other for the circuits.”   
  
Toland nodded. Toland accounted: all of the Cryptarch’s findings and him just another one, a gawky bird with gray wings pulled from the jungle, and then the sprite, the one he had quickly adjusted to calling his Ghost. He pretended to watch her arrange the needles, but he had another account to settle as well, and this one not as fine and sharp. Adonna had never said that she expected him to stay camped outside her cart and he had never said that he expected to move in with the Warlocks. Was this an adolescence? An adolescent decision, a choice between two parents? No. He took one of the metal needles, fidgeted, pressed the tip up against the pad of his thumb just hard enough to depress the skin. He had been re-born full grown, the Ghost the only proof of any personal history. There had, Toland had learned quickly with a cadre of young thanatonauts, to have been a body to resurrect.   
  
As he had expected, Adonna knew that his thoughts were straying toward the Guardians. “Did you talk to Ikora today?”   
  
“Not today, scholar. She did invite me to a class yesterday, with a squall of Voidwalkers in tow.”  
  
“A squall of Stormcallers?” She played.   
  
“A pit. A staring of Voidwalkers.”  
  
“A wall of Titans.”  
  
He tugged the conversation back to Warlocks. “Each of them is years older in their rebirth than I am.”   
  
“That’s a compliment.”  
  
He wondered whether it was. There were many classes with members with different amounts of experience. “They throw themselves into the nothingness with an abandon that I cannot replicate. It reeks of recklessness.”   
  
Adonna took the needle from him, set it back in its slot in the carefully fitted box. The boots caved in on themselves slowly as they sat unattended beside her. “Is that not the way you want your path to be?”  
  
“There is another school, the Sun. Ikora said I … have some measure of talent.”   
  
She looked from him to the road and back. “I’d be lying if I said I didn’t want you to become a Cryptarch, but that isn’t the Guardian way. I’ve never brought up a Guardian before. Do what you want, boy.”   
  
They talked of sewing after that. She showed him how to mend the boots. In the evening she pulled the curtains down around her cart and slept as she had for years before he arrived.   
  
He stood by the door like a guard, his arms crossed. His mentor the Cryptarch slept, and did the Warlocks? Did Ikora, his other teacher? Something around her eyes suggested a watchful sleeplessness that Toland aspired to for himself. He could not imagine it looking as wise on his face: at best it might be a kind of frenzied desperation, a moon-junkie who had studied in the night for so long that he looked exhausted. Still he aspired.   
  
He had downplayed what Ikora had said to him about the path of the Sunsinger when he spoke to Adonna, although now he was not sure why. It had not seemed right to tell Adonna, not when Toland was trying to figure out so many new things at once. Newborn Guardians often tried out different roles within their classes before they settled down, he knew. The newborns who gathered together had both discussed and demonstrated this. This power felt different, though, almost forbidden. Adonna had never said that she would fault him for it. Somehow, guilt was implied. Guardians, Adonna thought, were essential allies who could be easily and neatly cheated.   
  
He took his hands from under his arms and held them in fists. The flame glowed first from the undersides of his wrists. He did not know why; perhaps there was some conductivity in the veins. The flame quickly caught on nothing and spread like an aura, keeping to the outlines of him until the wings curled from his shoulders and he felt the wind push against them. The fire curtained in front of his eyes, leaving the street obscured but so much more clarified than before. He could burn the cart if he wanted. He raised his hands to watch the flame, enjoying the cool trickle of the power as it counted down to psychic drain. For now it was a force of nature, a push he could feel in his legs and in his gut. He watched the Tower, watched someone shuffle around the corner and see him, and let the fire run its course.


	50. A Closed and Secret System

His last letter asked what gift he should give her.

She told him, wrote it in green shining runes that bled onto paper that disappeared into fog. Eris and Toland did not know that she would follow him into the throneworlds soon, seeking resolution and quiet vengeance. They knew the gift and the giving.

A dance, she told him. An orbit, a circuit, a closed and secret system.

He appeared to her in the deep of the morning, when even sleepless Guardians nested away from the dark gulf of the tired earth.

"I visit you from a place surrounded by eyes and soothed by scorn,” he said, and she held out her hands. Gloved and scarred fingers interlocked with hands like smoke. 

"All is defied, none are Taken,” said Eris.

"Perhaps taken just briefly,” said Toland, and bent to kiss her.

She moved away just enough to feel the stillness where his breath should be, enough to promise. “Or given, like a late gift.”

He smiled at her impatience, and backed into the darkness, and she followed.


	51. The Lighthouse

Osiris, Osiris. Taken from the old texts and paired with a sigil of the Sun.   
  
Surely you have heard of him. You might know him only as that vicious competition and the shining door, that unlocked safe of a Vex treasure-world. You might know him as the shadows behind Vance’s candles - so many candles, glowing in fraternal hazards out in the Reef! How many must be snuffed each day by light-stepping champions? How many must be requisitioned every day over again after they burned down?   
  
Do not assume that I mock without understanding what value he brought to the Vanguard. Osiris knew something. He saw a future in which the whole world is the water boiling with the lid on.   
  
You might think Osiris and I had common cause. Two exiles, out here in the world, never mind that I transposed myself to the Sea of Screams and he … what? We learned Crota's name, but Osiris sussed the prince of places out before we knew his title.   
  
And what knowledge!  
  
There is no justice in these judgements. The Concordat would have been no better, but they were opportunistic poisoners. It was Guardian opinion that mattered. When Osiris uses the Light, it’s a noble mystery, it’s a disappearance. Where did Osiris go, people ask, the exile sentence just a whisper of a breath on the end of the words. They assume volition when it comes to the shining son.   
  
I do not receive that courtesy.   
  
There is that one benefit to having acolytes.


	52. Warlock Answers

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Essentially a more narrative version of [this post](http://ir-anuk.tumblr.com/post/163445647219/i-keep-thinking-about-ikoras-dialogue-when-the).

Kass realized, then, why Ikora was the Vanguard.

She had thought she had known before. She had thought that it had something to do with power, something to do with authority, something to do with the impossible corona of electricity around herself when she first learned to Stormcall. Something to do with calculations and hidden libraries, rediscovered files, knowledge hoarded like water. Ikora was doing none of those things as Kass ran toward Tower North, looking for Amanda.

The Cabal advanced shield-first, pressing. Kass fired through the handholds. Sparks jumped and reflected in puddles of rainwater. Three more Cabal advanced through the courtyard ahead of her, setting fire to the wall hangings.

Ikora’s presence was a spark at the bottom of a well. She had protected her Light, drawn it within herself for however long she would have it. She had predicted this, somehow, and stored up a defense for even the greatest threat. (Defense and self-destruction at the same time; what clawing dreams had led to the need for such a precaution? Ikora had partitioned her own lifeblood out in case she needed a reserve.)

Kass shot again, the long, jagged jaw of the gun spitting strange fire. It boiled between plates, and the Cabal dropped the shield as their hand melted.

She dropped the Cabal behind a pile of stone that had been blasted out of the wall. When she looked up, the rest were gone.

“Ikora, the Speaker is gone.” Even in the other world inside the Dreadnaught, her Ghost had not sounded this panicked.

Ikora stood on the topmost circle, blue fire gusting around her like fog over a lake. Looking at the sky sent Kass scrambling again to her guttering mental link to the Traveler. Ikora reeled her thought in with a quick tug. Although there were meters between them, Kass felt suddenly that she stood face-to-face with Ikora, seeing the warmth in her wide eyes.

With that tug came the Vanguard’s presence in the Light, as fierce and focused as she had been on the comm. Instead of asking questions, she was filled to the brim with answers. She allowed Kass a glimpse into a window behind which there were emergency routes, civilian evacuations, Hidden networks, Eris Morn’s mysterious travels. When it shut again, Kass’ focus remained steadfast.

Ikora let her go to arms’ length. Her regard for her Guardian resided there, not her innermost impressions of Kass but her pride for all six of the Guardians who had fought Oryx. Here lived her regard for the exterior things: Kass as Warlock, Kass as teammate, Kass as thousand-times-born soldier in a war she had not seen begin. She looked at all of this with a peaceful and open quiescence, and then she turned away and let Kass’ Light go.

Ikora Rey took three steps to push into a run and launched herself off the tiled floor just as a Cabal ship, heavy-limbed and coiled with the sharp shapes of gun muzzles, lumbered into the sky.

Kass felt the Light flair again as Ikora shouted. “Red Legion. You will take no more from us, and you will find no mercy in me!”

All of her power was concentrated on the ship now, none left for the lone Ghost-and-Warlock. Kass turned toward Tower North as her own Light flared. More packets of messages from Ikora stuck to it like burrs. The Vanguard would pass these treasured, encoded bits of knowledge to any Warlock she met, but now was not the time for contemplative curation. Ikora’s answer was her kick off the balcony. Kass charged toward Tower North before she saw the collision, but Ikora’s answer bit at her heels. Ikora’s answer echoed in the rumbles that might have been explosions and might have been the roots of the Tower shaking. Ikora’s answer would follow Kass until they both rebuilt their home.


	53. Hunter's Luck

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Based on [this comment.](http://ir-anuk.tumblr.com/post/164461284899/look-at-you-ive-seen-a-horse-before-have-i)

“Look at you. I’ve seen a horse before. Have I seen a horse before? At a parade or something. Good solid infantry machines. Big. And, uh.”

The soft nose blew a puff of dust onto Cayde’s hand. This was the second animal he had patted today, and he was beginning to understand why Hawthorne liked them. There was something reassuringly solid about them. They would last, even if immortal Guardians were falling by the fireteam, and – “But you’re not just for the front lines. Look good at parades, too. Feels like it was a decade ago, that parade. Look at you! Good horse.” 

Ikora let her boots scrape against the barn floor on purpose, so Cayde heard her careful steps behind him. He could just imagine her walking through the dimness, stirring up the golden dust motes. Wouldn’t do to let her know that he minded she overheard him, though.

“You okay?” Ikora asked. Reliable Ikora.

“Yeah. Just petting a horse. Normal apocalypse occupation.” ( _Apocalypse._ It was an old word, flavored with old religions, sharp with the memory of a time when Earth and no planet else was filled with mortal people.) 

“Keen to ride it into battle?” She sounded serious. She had been keyed up yesterday, so the grave tenor reassured him that she had calmed down. 

“Nah. Not yet,” Cayde said, and stroked the horse while she shifted to look at Ikora. “Gonna do what Hunters do with everything that reminds ‘em of death. Tell ‘em it’s lucky.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey! If you've followed me this far, raise a hand and let me know whether you'd like me to create a new collection for Destiny 2 or keep going with this one. It seems like fic for the trailers and beta falls into a gray area.


	54. Wrong Place, Wrong Time

As Guile-11 fell onto the deck, he wished the Vex had pushed him.

The flanges of his Ghost scraped across the ground as he pulled the unlit corpse toward him. That’s what it felt like, now; he just had time to register the lifelessness of the Ghost before Ghaul’s heavy foot swept up toward his head. An old Guardian holding a corpse. Guile pushed himself to hands and knees and rose in time to take the blow like a good Titan, head down and Ghaul’s foot ringing against his armor as he stood his ground. Sparks flew in the wind on the edges of the flagship.

Ghaul hesitated for a moment, making a noise of amusement under his flat-nosed mask, and hit him again.

Guile knew that he was not a vanguard, lowercase v. He was a counter-fighter, a reactionary, one who resided in the wake of things and no further from the source. Up here, where the new Shipwright had dropped him, he was as close to the cause of this destruction as he could be, and his mind was beginning to retreat from it.

_Be a Titan. Become a wall._ He clutched his Ghost in shaking hands and thought that he heard a voice like his own on the wind, spewing the mantra as he retreated.

(Guile-12 his twin had disappeared into a Vex gate, the scratched blue metal of his arm flailing. His face and chest had already been swallowed, so the clawing gesture was silent.)

Guile looked down at the Ghost in his hands as Ghaul stomped toward him. That mantra, that voice - _stay strong, brother. Defend your home. If you fall, you can always come back. Time does not flow perpetually forward on the Endless Steps._

Except that he was not on the Endless Steps now, and that foot swept forward again, and, if the Vex had pushed him maybe he would have had a chance to reverse it all, to walk back down the stairs with his Ghost alive beside him and his brother alive beside them. Guile pitched off the edge.

The world spun, black sky and red City and black cloud and yellow sparks flying around it all.

If the Vex had attacked, Guile would have had least known his enemy instead of being briefed on the Cabal in a rocking ship piloted by the woman he still thought of as the young Shipwright…

The Ghost slipped from Guile-11’s hands, and in a moment of grim clarity he saw that the Ghost was the voice of his brother, that that voice was falling at the same speed as his body but further and further away on the buffeting wind, and that he was about to watch Guile-12 die again in some strange manner that would uproot his life, and that the City was burning, and that the voice in his head was saying _you cannot redo this. The stairs only go up._

_Only up._

If the Vex had attacked, he thought, Guile-11 might have mattered to this fight.


End file.
